> From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] 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. _______________________________________________ bblisa mailing list [email protected] http://www.bblisa.org/mailman/listinfo/bblisa
