I've worked with a NetApp before, using NFS as the protocol. My
experience was negative; the storage was slow, and we ran into problems
caused by the NFS protocol. Software that worked fine off a local disk
had to be tweaked to work off the NFS export, due to lingering NFS lock
files. Using a local SATA disk, we got double the performance of the
NFS-over-GigE (even with a slower processor on the local-SATA host).
But I don't attribute our problems to the NetApp company or their
product. Our issues were related to the local network environment and
the use of NFS. In 15 years of using NFS, it has always been a sketchy
experience. Whereas a Samba, WedDAV, or SFTP (OpenSSH) server might go
offline, NFS can freeze your entire server (unless you're using a
user-space NFS, which just means more configuration hassle). In short,
I recommend against all storage products based on NFS.
I've also used an HP StorageWorks SAN, over fibre. My experience
was positive (it worked, and seemed fast). But again, I don't attribute
this to HP; I just think a SAN is a better storage solution than a NAS:
it has no TCP/IP or NFS to foul things up, and it has a dedicated fibre
connection. But of course, if you want to share a SAN to your
workstations, you're back to using something like Samba, WebDAV... or
even NFS. :)
I recently built a storage "appliance" server for a client. It's a
24TB Silicon Mechanics RAID6 server, on a GigE network. It's using
Samba to share to Windows, and Netatalk (AppleTalk) to share to Mac
video-editing workstations. Although I got burned by a firmware issue
in the Western Digital 2.0TB drives we used, I'm still happy with the
hardware and the support from Silicon Mechanics. The system is
blazingly fast, overflowing with RAM, and the price was less than half
of a comparable HP, NetApp, or Dulce product.
The fact that it's "just a Linux box" means I was able to integrate
it tightly into their existing network using tools like rsync, cron, and
ssh. The 3ware RAID card has a web-based administration GUI, so it's
easy to manage (but I personally use the tw_cli command-line tool).
This system would also make a world-class Virtual Machine server, btw.
If you have not yet done so, I recommend you consider a Linux-based
solution running on Silicon Mechanics hardware. You'll get *a lot* more
bang for your buck.
--Derek
On 10/13/2009 06:25 AM, John Aldrich wrote:
Apologies for the OT post here, but I need some advice and for reasons that
are explained below, I can't ask locally. :-)
We're looking to add our first storage appliance at work. Here in my area,
we also have a LUG and a LUG mailing list. Some of the smartest people I
know are on that list. Unfortunately, a couple of them also work for
competing VARs who are bidding on our storage appliance project. :-)
Wondering if anyone here has any knowledge, preferably first-hand, of any of
the following:
Scaled Computing
LSI
NetApp
HP StorageWorks
Those are the four primary proposals I have currently. I would appreciate
any feedback anyone has on the network storage the above companies make.
thanks!
