[BBLISA] Recommendation for NAS appliance?

[Paul Beltrani]

On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 9:58 AM, Ian Levesque <ian at crystal.harvard.edu> wrote:
>
> On Mar 2, 2010, at 6:09 PM, Paul Beltrani wrote:
>
>> We're looking for a basic, enterprise class appliance to serve 15TB to
>> 30TB of mission critical storage via NFS.   We're considering the
>> offerings from NetApp and EMC but they're much more than we need. For
>> example, we don't need features like mirroring or remote replication.
>
> Your requirements are a little vague - what does "enterprise class appliance" mean to you? What features *are* important to you? What's your budget?


The quick and dirty answer:

"enterprise class" =  Highly available and fault tolerant.  Warranty,
Service and Technical support are available if desired.

"appliance" = A hardware product that does the heavy lifting of
providing the service.  Basically, all you need to do is install the
unit and configure it.  It's the opposite of build an NFS cluster from
parts.

"mission critical" = A company depends on it to run their business.

Important features:  NFS

Budget: We  can afford the EMC Celerra or a NetApp.

>
> Are you sure you need an appliance? Is there a reason that a bunch of disks in a box couldn't serve NFS to your liking?

A bunch of disks in a box does not provide HA/FT service.  At the very
least we would have to build a cluster.  An appliance is a short path
to HA/FT and generally has simpler administration than a home grown
solution.

In short, the Celerra and NetApp meet the requirements.  I'm just
looking for alternatives to see how the landscape may have changed
since I last spec'd one of these.

  - Paul Beltrani