Sun seem to be pretty serious with their 7000 series products. I have one of their 7110s and it is.... interesting. On the plus side the dashboard utilizing dtrace to show you analytics of performance is amazing. The use of zfs helps me sleep well at night. If I had the spare cash to ramp up to the redundant head models which allow HDD choice, their use of flash SSDs for cache is a very cool approach and technically much better thought out than a Tier 0 of pure flash SSDs that are no use to the other tiers of storage - they can front 1Tb SATA drives with a few wicked fast SSDs and outperform a shelf of 15k RPM drives for example.
On the downside, I cant seem to get the LDAP (or NIS) to Active Directory identity mapping to work such that cross windows/unix share acls are identical. Sun are young in the NAS space (at least on the CIFS side) and it shows. However, for pure NFS or pure CIFS shares they are probably worth adding to the evaluation list.... In addition, I was very excited about OnStor when they first arrived on the scene. They provide a NAS head(s) to arbitrary 3rd party storage. They seemed to have the right mentality and approach 6 years ago when we first talked to them, but they were too young to be trusted by the company I was with at the time - we went with Netapp. However, our experience with Netapp was typical - nothing exciting, performance was only ok given the vast wedges of cash we parted with, etc. OnStor allow for my favourite form of RAID - RAEA (Redundant array of expensive arrays). As such, you can mirror across arrays and perhaps more usefully/practically, you can migrate seamlessly from one array to another. The freedom from single vendor storage lock-in was very appealing. Would be curious to hear how the research/evaluation goes. The NFS space seems to move a fair bit year by year. Regards, Rob
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