Edward> For what it's worth, I am not very inclined toward 7000 "amber Edward> road." I am more inclined toward a normal solaris server with Edward> ZFS, NFS, and Samba.
I've been meaning to reply to this, and since I just went through a Netapp vs. Sun 7x00 series storage evaluation (not as indepth as I would have liked I admit, we were under the gun...) I'll chime in here. First off, Netapp's support is decent. Not great, not fantastic, but not terrible. Do you need to nudge them at times? Sure. As they have added more and more features to OnTap 7.x series, they've suffered from more and more issues in my mind. When they were just an NFS/CIFS appliance, they were rock solid. As they've added features, reliability of new releases has suffered, but once you find a release that works, they're solid. Though I did recently find an issue where NDMP got so hung up that I had to reboot the filer. Not fun, but at least my NFS clients didn't care much. Anyway, Netapp's strengths to us are: 1) they're the incumbant and we know their product and it's features. 2) they have quota support on a per-user, per-qtree and per-group basis. 3) the hardware is solid. Beyond disks failing, nothing else has crapped out in quite a while. And when a disk fails, I don't worry about pulling the disk and putting a new one in. It just works. Weaknesses are: 1) 16G limit on Aggregates. This is the biggest complaint from NetApp users, since it's make building big volumes a total pain in the ass. And if you have volumes that grow/shrink, it makes balancing things tough. 2) SnapVault WAN performance sucks. SnapVault interface sucks. SnapVault reporting sucks. SnapVault diagnostics sucks. Can you tell I dislike SnapVault? It's fine over LAN or *short* WAN links, but once you start getting over 50-60ms TCP delay all performance just goes down the toilet. 3) They're expensive and they're not growin their storage size quickly enough for me. I want bigger volumes so I don't have to move data around. 4) NDMP on 7.2.5.1 has been slightly flaky. If it hangs, you're looking at a reboot, which sucks. 5) Lack of good disk usage reporting on a per-directory basis (including sub-dirs) without external tools like 'philesight'. To be fair, I don't know of ANY filesystem which is production ready which has this support. But once you get into the Tb range, it becomes more and more important. Now, looking at the Sun 7x00 series storage, it's just amazing in terms of price/Gb. Heck, the thumpers were great from that aspect too. Weakness: 1) Lack of quotas. Their stock answer of 'just make a new volume!' doesn't cut it when you need to do more project based work. This is a *big* killer for us, since we have user's (who doesn't?) who never like to cleanup files until you hold a gun to their head. Being able to quickly generate a list of the top users in a volume or qtree is key for us. I'd like it go down even further if I could! 2) Lack of good disk usage reporting on a per-directory basis (including sub-dirs) without external tools like 'philesight'. To be fair, I don't know of ANY filesystem which is production ready which has this support. But once you get into the Tb range, it becomes more and more important. 3) It's the new comer and we're not familiar with it's foibles, so an unknown is always harder to justify than the devil you know. 4) DR performance across the WAN is an unknown to us. Strengths: 1) Nesting volumes. Being able to create new volumes and grow them and nest them is fantastic! Wish Netapp would let me do that with qtrees. 2) Effectively unlimited volume sizes. This is nice, no arbitrary limits on how big a volume can be. 3) Performance looks to be excellent. 4) Price is excellent. In summary, we wish the 7x00 boxes had been out six months more before we had to make our decision so we could make a better evaluation. As it is, we went with Netapp because of Time, we had to get old equipment back to the leasing corp. In general, the feature we're looking for are 95% NFS support, and then some CIFS and iSCSI support. We'd really like to have a unified backup/HSM setup and right now CommVault seems to be doing this for us quite nicely. CommVault has other issues which I'd be happy to talk about in a seperate email if people are interested. Oh yeah, I'd love to see NDMPv5 out there with better support for indexed NDMP dumps and restores. It's not great now. Backups suck in general too, no matter what way you do them. :] Edward> But if I simply buy a normal solaris server and turn on NFS Edward> and Samba ... Acknowledge that I'll do my admin on CLI instead Edward> of GUI ... which is presently working on some random blackbox Edward> PC test setup ... then I can do everything I can think of. My Edward> NFS and CIFS tests have been successful. "zfs send" is Edward> supported to transmit a snapshot from one system to another. Edward> I can think of a few features that are missing, such as Edward> parallel or distributed filesystem ... but I can't name Edward> anything that's super critical for a small business. I agree that the CLI is the way to go in alot of ways. I hate web or JAVA GUIs and avoid them if I can. Netapp has a great CLI interface which I can use for all my interactions. But in the case of roll your own, when the parts break, it's nice to be able to not worry about which person inside the company put it together and whether they documented it properly, etc. Esp when you have remote sites to support. The comfort level of being able to have an engineer at a remote site do disk replacements without me worrying he'll bring down the production NFS server is key. I think the Sun system would have given me that comfort too, but I KNOW the netapp solution does. John _______________________________________________ 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/
