[BBLISA] Looking for possible options to NetApp storage

[Toby Burress]

On Tue, Feb 01, 2011 at 10:17:05PM -0500, Brian Reichert wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 01, 2011 at 09:54:00PM -0500, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> FWIW, the FreeBSD project has both ZFS and dtrace from Solaris.  I
> admit to having explored neither, but [Open]Solaris being in a weird
> place, it's nice to have some options to explore.

At work we have a SuperMicro box with OpenSolaris on it, and an ixSystems
(ixsystems.com) box with FreeBSD on it, both serving big ZFS shares.

Loving BSD and... tolerating Linux, OpenSolaris was kind of a jump for
me, and is a pretty frustrating environment.  That said, Real Solaris
with Oracle hardware (haha) probably works more smoothly, and FreeBSD
doesn't support every zfs option yet (like the integrated NFS/iSCSI
sharing).  FreeBSD does however support snapshots/sends/rollbacks/etc.
I wish we were using it everywhere, so that we could take advantage of it.

So I prefer the BSD box and I'm actually pricing out a new one, but ymmv.