[BBLISA] Recommendation for NAS appliance?

[Edward Ned Harvey]

> Can you provide the spec's or models of the netapp and sun box that you
> were/are using so we can get a better idea on the comparison?
> Also, how many clients are accessing it?

It's not a fair comparison in terms of hardware.  We had a 2-yr old Netapp
in need of upgrade, and replaced it with a new modern Sun.  It was a
definite upgrade in terms of hardware, so the two systems are not on equal
ground in terms of performance comparison.  I suppose I was being unfair
when I emphasized the huge performance difference we saw, but I don't feel
it was totally unfair.  This is a more fair representation, albeit also more
long-winded:

Our old system had 1 Gb Ether.  It was a NetApp Storevault S500 with 5
disks.  You would expect this to be limited by the Ethernet, but at all
times, its performance was significantly slower than we thought would be
reasonable.  We could never seem to get more than 300Mbit across that link,
and could not find any way to identify why it was so slow.  Since it's
onTap, there is a lack of standard monitoring tools (iostat, top, etc) and
the supposed "equivalent" didn't give us valuable information, despite all
the tech support hours spent on phone and email.  This was part of the
influence that encouraged us to go with Sun:  because we have a complete OS
and could install anything we want, to look at everything we want to know.
The Sun box is much more open to the curious admin.

If you compare a modern NetApp versus a modern Sun Server, I cannot say
which would perform better.  I expect they would both be limited by the
Ethernet, even if you aggregate all the links.  But I expected the old
Netapp to max out 1Gb, and was disappointed.  I expect my new Sun to max out
4x 1Gb, and have not been disappointed.

Our new server is a SunFire X4275, using ZFS striping mirrors, and one SSD
for ZIL.  It easily maxes out the 4x 1Gb ethers.