Check out "open filer" for basic needs. Yes, the WAN component is huge. Do you want to pay for storage features, or WAN capacity?
I believe the two most compelling companies "pay up" for netapp are: 1) SnapMirror. Highly optimized WAN traffic feature. 2) "Nobody ever got fired for buying -fill in the blank-!" Companies often want to pay a bit more for a company that they know will be in business for a long, long time. EMC made tons of money because of it (with, IMHO, crappy and expensive gear). Thanks, Jim Gasek --- [email protected] wrote: From: Richard Pieri <[email protected]> To: blug <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Looking for possible options to NetApp storage Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2011 20:40:54 -0500 On Feb 1, 2011, at 6:02 PM, Scott Ehrlich wrote: > > When you buy a NetApp appliance and corresponding disks, you are > buying the value add of snapshot technology and many other unique and > special features that make up a NetApp. Snapshots is hardly unique to NetApp. Just saying. In practice, when you buy a NetApp appliance you really buy NetApp's support and service, not the features. > For the same amount of money, or less, for enterprise-level storage > and backup, what might people recommend? Companies? Technologies? Do you need I/O fencing? What about local and long-haul replication? What are the remote management requirements? Do you need secure segregation between different business units? Will you be using direct I/O or will you need on-board cache? With or without battery backup? With or without power-fault write from cache? NAS, SAN, or both? FCAL or fabric? You should be asking yourself these questions and questions like them. Make a list of your requirements first, then find vendors who meet those requirements. Don't skimp. A site lives and dies with its data, whether a high school student's homework netbook or a 24x365 international trading platform. If storage fails, you lose. If it takes too long to recover, you fail. --Rich P. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
