On Oct 5, 2009, at 10:00 AM, Adam Levin wrote: > We've obviously got NetApp and Celerra on the list, as well as Isilon > coming in to talk to us. Can anyone suggest other entperprise NAS > solutions you've seen/used/can-or-can't recommend?
Isilon is not really in the same space -- they provide a virtualization front-end, but not the back-end storage itself. One name that I would recommend putting on the list is Panasas. I've heard good things about them. > One big thing we're looking at is namespace consolidation and > virtualization, so that we don't have to worry so much about having > many > small, independent storage units. Vendors who have this functionality > would be preferred, I think, to vendors that can't or won't do it, > though > there are always third party solutions to virtualize the NAS > namespace. One thing that UT has discovered is that it is very, very painful to put all your eggs into one basket (i.e., consolidate all your systems into one big system), and then to be forced to move that basket (i.e., if you're told that you have to move out of your current computer room facilities into new ones that they're building on the wrong side of I-35). This becomes doubly painful if you decided to consolidate everything into a high-availability "pair" of machines that just so happen to share the same physical chassis (like a NetApp 37xx). In that environment, it's not like you could fail everything over to one head, move the other head to the new location fail everything back, and then repeat the process. Or, what happens when something goes wonky and you have to reboot the whole filer, and thus take down virtually every single critical system you have? I understand the desire for economies of scale in consolidation, but there are very real costs to putting all your eggs in one basket. This is a situation that you want to go into with both eyes wide open, and know what you're getting yourself into. -- Brad Knowles <[email protected]> LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> _______________________________________________ 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/
