on 4/13/09 9:09 PM, Edward Ned Harvey said: > For what it’s worth – the off-list responses I’ve had are mostly > negative, citing things like uptime-impacting diagnosis procedures, > and excessively long (several months) time to resolution for > non-critical problems, and lack of callback for a dead system. I’ve > been advised by two people (which corroborates my personal > experience) that you must show dedication to managing your own case > and handholding with support to keep things moving, and if that isn’t > enough, you must be willing to escalate and elevate and become the > squeaky wheel.
We have had some issues that we've escalated, and not all of our problems have been solved as well or as quickly as we would have liked. However, what I've seen from other vendors is -- at best -- no better than what I've seen from NetApp. Most vendors have been worse, some much worse. We're not that big of a customer of theirs, but maybe we are big enough that perhaps they treat us different from other customers. > One person said they don’t have any problem with netapp support but > hate the sales team. We haven't had any problems with their sales team. If anything, they've recently been much more than cooperative, and offering us much bigger discounts than ever before. The key to working with high-priced vendors is to make sure that you have multiple sources to choose from, and then the high-priced vendors prices usually come down quite remarkably. If you really want to scare the pants of your local NetApp sales person (assuming they do care about your account), mention the name Panasas (see <http://www.panasas.com/>). > Even among the negative responses, at least a couple of people seem > willing to stick with netapp anyway. It seems there is either real > or perceived value in their niche that isn’t satisfiable by the other > alternatives. I’d love to know – In what ways are the netapp > superior to sun, to make the netapp more attractive even if you think > their sales or support is weaker? I know that for the features I’ve > been looking at, the sun seems more featureful than the netapp, so > I’d like to know what else there is that I’m missing. For one thing, although NetApp is generally very expensive, they have been rock-solid production-grade storage systems for many, many years. They just run, and run, and run. They don't break. And they take massive amounts of abuse. Sun may have rock-solid production-grade computer systems, but their storage appliances have just recently been born. Previously, all the serious enterprise-grade storage they sold was stuff from Hitachi that they re-badged. Sure, the Amber Road stuff uses a lot of components that have been around for a while, but this "storage appliance" implementation is new, and based on OpenSolaris, not Solaris. They have zero years of proven enterprise-grade storage systems experience with these products. Moreover, NetApp can provide virtually every single feature under the sun. Sure, you pay extra for most of them, but at least they're there. If you don't need those features, then there's no sense paying for them -- either build your own with JBOD, or get one of those new eight-bay Drobo Pro units. For those of us who do need, and who can make real use of, features like snapshots (combined with all the related features like snapshot mirroring, snapshot cloning, etc...), replication, de-duplication, storage clustering (including metro clustering), then there are relatively few vendors in this space that can be seriously considered. Sun can't provide all these features, but their Amber Road stuff does look like it has many of them, and certainly we all know where Sun has been going with this product and what kinds of features they're likely to be targeting. However, they don't provide all those features today, and given the questions of Sun's future, I'm not sure they ever will be able to. > • If you wish to snapshot one device onto another device, with ZFS, > you don’t need two enterprise-quality filers plus software licenses. > You can, if you want, send your snapshot to any system running ZFS, > which could be an additional enterprise server if you want, or you > could use some old PC, or anything in between. Are you sure you can do that with Amber Road? Moreover, if you're thinking at this level, then NetApp is not the right solution for you. If that's the way you want to go, then clearly no solution other than OpenSolaris or FreeBSD on commodity grade hardware is going to be satisfactory for you, and you prefer to spend your money building your storage systems yourself. That's perfectly fine, but that's not the model of a NetApp customer. > • All the software (opensolaris, zfs) is open source, so even if > something happens to the company, your platform isn’t dead. You can > simply migrate to a different set of hardware and continue as you > were. OpenSolaris is open source. The Amber Road storage appliance is not. You get source code for one, but not the other. You get all the source code for Linux, BIND, ISC/DHCP, etc..., but that doesn't give you a complete working Infoblox Network Services Appliance. Moreover, OpenSolaris is not Solaris. Solaris is a platform I would run as a production server (and do), but OpenSolaris is one I would have some questions about. I'd think about it long and hard before I took that risk. I might still do it anyway, if because I had no other choice. But I would think long and hard about it, and make sure I torture-tested the system as much as I could before I put it into operation. > • Because you’re using a “normal” os, you can download or build other > software packages, such as monitoring software of your choice. The > proprietary OS is unfortunately proprietary – if you want to do > something that wasn’t already built-in, you’re out of luck. The Amber Road equipment is closed. For them, OpenSolaris is just "firmware". You don't get a shell. You do get a CLI interface, but it is quite restricted in nature. Don't think of this as a Solaris or OpenSolaris box that happens to also provide storage. This is a storage appliance -- you don't get the keys to look inside. > • You can use "civilian" backup tools if you wish, such as tar, cpio, > USB hard drive, etc. You can also use enterprise backup tools if you > wish, such as netbackup, ndmp, etc. Unlike the proprietary OS, which > requires enterprise backup tools whether you like it or not. Granted > - I'll use the enterprise backup tool either way, but it's nice to > have an option. Again, if you're thinking like this, then you're clearly not a customer that would be suitable for NetApp. -- Brad Knowles <[email protected]> If you like Jazz/R&B guitar, check out LinkedIn Profile: my friend bigsbytracks on YouTube at <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> http://preview.tinyurl.com/bigsbytracks _______________________________________________ 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/
