We've been using NetApp for our tier 1 storage and x86/x86_64 RAID systems for tier 2 (no snaps or backups, but fast access) and tier 3 (archived "write once read occasionally"). This has worked pretty well, but the NetApp solution hasn't scaled as well as we'd like. On the other hand, it plays really well with NFS, and we haven't had much in the way of CIFS problems (we have some Windows and Mac laptops using this).
But NetApp doesn't scale that well, and it's pretty pricy. We've been looking into other vendors, and at the moment the leading contenders seem to be Isilon and Pillar. Anyone have any experience with these vendors and any kudos or warnings? 95% of our computers and data access are Linux (mostly EL4, a few EL3 and EL5), but playing well with Mac and Windows systems is also important. Feel free to reply offlist if you like ([email protected]). We run NFSv3 over TCP, NTP, DNS, NIS, all the usual stuff. We may use LDAP in the future, not sure yet. We have a couple of Windows serves providing Windows Domain services, etc. Cisco switches (multiple GB ethernet lines per filer head). Fiber-attached LTO4 robot for backups (will likely go to a SAN switch for backups in the near future). We will likely consolidate some of our tier 2 and 3 onto any new filers. but some will stay on the x86_64 boxes for some time to come. Performance, reliability, scalability- these are key. We also need visibility into where the storage goes; for instance to easily find all the storage used by a user, and where it is. We'd prefer not to have to purchase a third party app for that (him NetApp). We have all sorts of data, but it's almost all file based (not relational databases, etc). We need good NFS performance whether it's writing 100GB files or reading and writing directories with 100,000 files in them. It took some time, but we found the magic combination for NetApps and the Linux boxes; I would hope the Linux side of things would not change with any good quality filer... any guidance? Thanks, Miles
