[BBLISA] Summary: Recommendation for NAS appliance?

[Paul Beltrani]

On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 6:09 PM, Paul Beltrani <spamgrinder at gmail.com> 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.
>
> Would anyone care to recommend a vendor or appliance they're happy with?
>
>  - Paul Beltrani
>

Thank you to everyone who replied.  I appreciate your time and input.

There was a good discussion that included some nice sub-topics like
NetApp VS Sun and issues with Backups.  Please refer to the archives
for details.

A list of the vendors and products mentioned is summarized below.

  - Paul Beltrani


Vendors/Products mentioned:

BlueArc: http://www.bluearc.com/
No details.

Compellent: http://www.compellent.com/
No details.

EMC Celerra: http://www.emc.com/products/family/celerra-family.htm
Mentioned in the original post.

IBM:
In a direct reply someone said they were thrilled with the support
they received for the NAS gear they had purchased from IBM.  I found
that interesting as we have had an extremely bad experience with an
IBM SAN product.  It turns out the difference in our experiences may
have to do with the fact the SAN product was an IBM acquisition and
they had to reach out to a third party engineering team for any but
the most basic support. (The SAN unit was is the DS5100 and the third
party is LSI Corporation.)

Isilon Systems: http://www.isilon.com/
No details in the thread. However I have heard from people in person
that they were very pleased with the Isilon gear.

NetApp: http://www.netapp.com/
Mentioned in the original post.

Pillar Data Systems:	 http://www.pillardata.com/
No details.

Sun 4000 series:
http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/storage/open-storage/index.html
I'm not sure I would consider these NAS appliances but they do look
like a cost effective path to a Solaris NFS server.   Edward Ned
Harvey posted he had good experience replacing a NetApp with this type
of solution.  This started a small subthread with some discussion of
the NetApp VS Sun Storage option. Check the archive of for details.

Sun 7000 series:
http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/unified_storage/products.jsp

Looks much more robust than the 4000 series and includes clustering options.

Side note: Corporate Technologies was mentioned as a good resource for
Sun gear. http://www.cptech.com  I'll second that.  I've worked with
them several times in the past and it was always a positive
experience.