[BBLISA] Looking for possible options to NetApp storage

[Edward Ned Harvey]

> From: bblisa-bounces at bblisa.org [mailto:bblisa-bounces at bblisa.org] On
> Behalf Of Scott Ehrlich
> 
> Now, say you have available shelving or drive bays.    NetApp
> shelves/storage additions cost a lot of money.   Say you want to add
> 40 - 200+ TB.   Say you have a need to add more (multi terabyte) disk
> storage, be it from NetApp oir someone else.

A couple of years ago I retired our netapp in favor of a sun server with
solaris & ZFS.  We use it for a NFS/CIFS server.  For this purpose, solaris
& ZFS are much better functionality than the netapp...  Although I'm sure
there must be something netapp does better, I don't know what it is.

For a newcomer to ZFS, I would recommend buying sun hardware and probably
solaris.  Just for the sake of staying in a mainstream supportable
configuration.  But an awful lot of people who are seriously into ZFS later
switch to nexenta and silicon mechanics.

The reasons I prefer ZFS over WAFL are primarily compatibility.  Yes you can
build a ZFS server out of a blackbox for free.  Yes you can run solaris and
other ZFS machines as VM guests in VMWare etc.  Yes you can send snapshots
to/from it for free.  Yes it's a normal OS with all the apps you're likely
to care about, so you can script things as you like and use tools that you
prefer.  Long story short, the problem with netapp are (a) you have to buy
netapp hardware (b) you have to run this wacky weird OS that can't run
normal apps or use unix-like config files etc and (c) every little thing is
another license.  It's just so DARN proprietary!  If you want to send
snapshots from one system to another in netapp, you have to buy two
full-priced servers, and then add on the snapmirror license, which is
another couple of grand.

The way things are now, I run solaris at work.  I use "zfs send" to send
snapshots onto a backup server.  From there we rotate disks offsite.  No
additional cost for any of these features.  We use normal system monitoring
tools, and we schedule things via cron.  I use ZFS at home.  They are
commodity SATA disks, and if I need to, I can connect them to any laptop or
pc to restore files out of there.

Screw netapp and their proprietary junk!   :-D   I couldn't be happier.
Unless oracle was less evil.  I'd really love to buy cheaper hardware and
run ZFS on something like a Dell server, but the compatibility is rather
poor this way.  Going with the all-oracle configuration is the safest
configuration for somebody who's experimenting and building a new production
server.

If you just want to see what it's all about, you can run solaris inside of
vmware.  VMware introduces some limitations that you otherwise wouldn't
have...  Like inability to remove disks while system is up and stuff like
that.  But certainly good enough to see how it satisfies your needs.

Despite the evilness of oracle...  They're not as bad as netapp.