>>>>> "Adam" == Adam Levin <[email protected]> writes:
Adam> Our group is an architecture group, and we're poking into data Adam> center consolidation and enterprise NAS. Fun! Adam> We've obviously got NetApp and Celerra on the list, as well as Adam> Isilon coming in to talk to us. Can anyone suggest other Adam> entperprise NAS solutions you've seen/used/can-or-can't Adam> recommend? Adam> Personally, I'm a fan of NetApp, having used their stuff for a Adam> long time, and assuming the company can afford it. :) I like Netapp too, but I'm getting more and more pissed at their silly 16Tb limit on aggregates, it really starts killing you when you have 12 shelves, each with 14 1Tb drives in them. It makes carving up storage painful again. Adam> One big thing we're looking at is namespace consolidation and Adam> virtualization, so that we don't have to worry so much about Adam> having many small, independent storage units. Vendors who have Adam> this functionality would be preferred, I think, to vendors that Adam> can't or won't do it, though there are always third party Adam> solutions to virtualize the NAS namespace. Adam> If anyone has experience with these, too, it might be an Adam> interesting discussion. I have no direct experience, but have Adam> been at two companies that used and *hated* RAINFinity. Acopia Adam> seems less hated. I'm not a Microsoft guy, so I'm not sure Adam> whether/how DFS could help. We went down both the Rainfinity (before my time) and Acopia routes and both have interesting ideas, but both are at the wrong level unfortunately, because they both ignore (and have too really) the problem of backups and restores. If you have an appliance like the Acopia in front of a bunch of storage, how do you do a restore from six months ago? You can either: a) backup the data from the backend, completely away from the frontend which is fast for backups, but makes restore horribly painful. b) backup *through* the frontend, which blows your caching unless there's a way to say that all access from host X,Y or Z doesn't affect the cache. It's also slower, since you're now putting the load all on the frontend, which is where all your clients work through as well. We have so far gone with Netapps for storage, and CommVault for the combined backup and HSM piece. It's not in production yet due to some bugs in Netapp's OnTap which requires us to upgrade all our filers to 7.3.1.1 (or newer). Not fun, esp with the growth of iSCSI luns in our environment. So I'm pretty down on NFS aggregation boxes like Acopia, unless they can address the backup issue well, and I haven't seen that yet, but I also admit we've given up on them. 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/
