> From: [email protected] [mailto:discuss- > [email protected]] On Behalf Of [email protected] > > I'd also be interested in feedback on this kind of 'less-than-tier 1' > storage in general, particularly in comparison to Netapp/Fujitsu/DDN/Dell, > etc.
I don't know infotrend, but I know Netapp, Dell, Sun, and generic custom build ZFS servers. My experience with netapp has been, mostly, excellent. A drive fails in the middle of the night, and a replacement has arrived at my desk before I even get to work. My experience with Dell is almost as good - as long as you paid for a good warranty. A drive fails in the middle of the night, I get the alert and call it in. A replacement arrives same day. My experience with Sun is ... I'm going to say it's as good as dell, because I believe the overall quality is about the same ... But we had a bad experience once where a replacement drive arrived with a newer firmware than the old drive, and therefore the total drive length was 1 block smaller, so it couldn't re-mirror. Our system remained degraded for quite a while, while we tried to flash old firmware onto the drive, and get additional drives fedex'd to us from other warehouses around the country. It was a pain. I think in the end, they failed to get us a compatible replacement, so we backed up the data to another system, then destroyed and recreated the whole system. That situation is precisely the type of thing that should be caught by their QA, which is the selling point for the high cost vendors instead of the generic vendors. The risk of little fatal problems like that is higher with the low cost vendors, but it's nonzero with the high cost vendors. If you pay the extra, you're paying for lower risk. There is no absolute right and wrong choice - lots of times the low cost vendor is ok, and sometimes the high cost vendor is *not* ok. You can only make a blind guess as to whether or not the difference of risk is worth the extra cost. Base it on the value and importance of your data and system staying up, versus difference of cost of hardware. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
