On Tue, 3 Mar 2009, Brad Knowles wrote: > We're being told the same. However, all vendors we've talked to have > grudgingly admitted that it's going to be at least a couple of years before > FCoE actually arrives, and iSCSI can still be useful until then.
Yeah, we figured the same, so we're still experimenting with iSCSI. > Moreover, EMC doesn't have a native de-duplication solution, they just OEM ... > Finally, I think their de-dupe solution is more oriented towards backups as > opposed to primary storage. > > Contrariwise, NetApp does iSCSI out-of-the-box (no additional licenses > required), their de-dupe solution was developed in-house and is 100% native, > and intended for primary storage but also useful with backups. With VMWare ... I'm not surprised. We're not really looking at a storage vendor as part of this. We are a multi-vendor shop already, and tend to choose the best vendor for the solution we require. We've got EMC SAN and NAS, NetApp NAS (and possibly expanding to SAN), and we're looking at other vendors for their unique solutions (like Compellent). For backups, we're looking at EMC, but also NetApp, Diligent and Data Domain. I worked for NetApp for a year, and I really like their products in general. This discussion is mostly just to see what others are thinking about / doing with respect to iSCSI. > Simply put, IP is a very, very heavy protocol on top of which to layer a > highly latency-sensitive block storage protocol, and you have to throw a lot > more hardware at it in order to get the same order of performance. > > The same was true with Token Ring vs. Ethernet, and FDDI vs. 100Base-TX. But > now we have GigE and that's probably faster than FDDI, and 10GigE is > definitely faster than FDDI. I hear you. Of course, DCE won't solve the problem of sending SAN traffic over the WAN where iSCSI can do that, but, uh, I'm not sure many people would want to do that anyway. :) > We're in the process of building a new datacenter, and FCoE is the > block-storage protocol we are designing towards. But that's going to live > side-by-side with iSCSI, and over here on the Unix side of the house we're > most likely going to continue to use NetApps and NFS, since that brings us so > many good benefits. > > This is a multi-protocol world. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. This last statement is the key, I think, and what we're basically going with as well. I'd like to start testing VMWare on NFS with NetApp, since I think that would give some nice benefits as well. Of course, good luck convincing Oracle and Exchange people that NFS is OK (note that at $WORK-2, we ran our whole Internet-based business on Oracle via NFS to NetApp -- it was wonderful :) ). -Adam _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
