[BBLISA] Looking for possible options to NetApp storage

[Matt Iavarone]

On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 8:33 AM, Edward Ned Harvey <bblisa4 at nedharvey.com> wrote:
>> From: Daniel Feenberg [mailto:feenberg at nber.org]
>>
>> I'd really be interested in anyone reporting on their experience with
>> Nexenta or Silicon Mechanics -
>
> The best place to find these people will be ...
>        the zfs-discuss mailing list at opensolaris...
>        The forums on nexenta.org ...
>
>
>> We looked into the Sun 7220 and the sales guy said it did
>> not support that, although I couldn't tell if he meant we couldn't do it,
>> or that they wouldn't help us.
>
> The sun 7xxx series is based on opensolaris, customized for user simplicity.
> If you don't want simplicity (aka you want to login as root and run scripts
> and build applications etc) there is nothing stopping you from doing that.
> But it's officially unsupported.
>
> Not like that means much of anything.  "Officially supported" doesn't stray
> much from the mainstream either.  I have an officially supported premium
> support contract on solaris 10, and I had a problem with what seems like a
> bug in dd.  The support team told me, "We don't support dd."
>
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>

The 7000 series is based on Solaris 11 and the OS is abstracted by an
application layer called Fishworks.  Everything you do at the OS layer
is logged and can void your warranty (apparently this is at the
discretion of the support personnel).  There was a bug in an earlier
version of the software that caused problems with file systems running
dedup, but that has since been resolved.

The unit itself works great, although the dedup issue has caused two
outages for us.  We looked at EMC and NetApp, and the Sun unit was
cheaper and offered more options and performance.  NFS, CIFS, HTTP,
FTP, dedup, compression, iscsi, FC and replication are all built in,
while the others want to charge a license fee for each.

We also have home grown ZFS storage running Solaris 11 Express on dell
servers and md 1000is.  I have these in a lower environment running
NFS for our ESX farm.  We are currently doing one way replication, and
although we are using mostly 7.2k disks, performance is really good.