Dan Melomedman wrote: > I didn't suggest doing nothing. In fact, something needs to be done badly to > replace NFS, but not many people are willing to do it, if at all. I guess > they're satisfied with 90%. What if you Honda would break-down 10% of the > time, would be satisfied with your new purchase? I certainly wouldn't, I > would look for an alternative.
I've been using a NetApp F720 with linux and freebsd NFS clients for almost two years, and I have had 0% NFS failure. I've been very happy mounting my maildirs over NFS. Where are your failure statistics? Please provide us with a cost/performance/stability evaluation of other solutions you have implemented, as well. Maybe you have the money to spend $300,000+ on commercial equipment that has excellent clustering/failover support, hot-swappable everything, hugely scalable file systems that can be easily shared between nodes, and the ability to do your laundry for you, but many of us don't. NFS provides a much cheaper and easier means of sharing a file system over the network to our machines. For at least a third of the cost, a NetApp cluster can be purchased that provides HA and blistering NFS speeds. A single NetApp will probably cost you 20k+ and provides excellent stability and speed. An intel class (off-the-shelf) NFS server can built for almost nothing and be fairly reliable. You don't have to be ultra-reliable for most smtp server situations, anyway. We're not talking DoD mission critical information here. Why replace NFS? There already ARE many options if you don't want to use NFS. NFS is what it is... We use it because it works for our environment. It provides the stability and performance we need at a price we can afford. (Maybe the other options just aren't as free [as in beer] as you would like them to be.) -- Clint Bullock Network Administrator University of Georgia Office of the Vice President for Research
