On Tue, Jun 29, 2004 at 02:29:55PM -0700, Clayton Weise wrote:
We use netapps (www.netapp.com) and it works great. One of the big
things that made me move towards the netapp in place of many of the
other NAS units out there was the fact that it runs a nix based OS.
Most of the ones, say.. Dell for example just run a stripped down
version of windows with file sharing for unix. It doesn't give you
the ability to make any tweaks to the nfs server. We've been using
the netapps for about 6 months now and it's been awesome. A client
that hosts in our datacenter turned us on to the netapps nas units.
He's been using them for I think about 2 years now and swears by
them.
Well, I have been using NetApp systems since 1997.
They are absolutely wonderful systems.
BUT
They do not run any type of UNIX system, they run something called
Data OnTap, current revision is 6.5.
There are many models available.
My old employer still has a F210 in production, this system is a
Pentium 75 with 128MB of RAM using non-Ultra wide SCSI. It houses the
RCS based configurations for the whole ISP.
My old employer has a F720 in production for UNIX home directories and
commercial webhosting data space.
My old employer has a F720 in production for UNIX home directories and
CIFS shares for the staff.
My old employer has a F760 in production for UNIX home directories for
the storage of mail in Maildir format, using Courier-IMAP for IMAP and
POP3 access, Postfix as MTA/LDA. One small area is handled by
vpopmail but that area is being phased out because of the qmail
requirements.
30K mailboxes, 6000+ DSL accounts, many hundreds of T1s and colo
customers - the NetApp systems ROCK for storage of critical data.
But it doesn't run any kind of UNIX :)
Oh, and good NetApp systems use Fibre-Channel drives, there are some
newer systems that *look* like they might be ATA based, but I haven't
played with them. Their near-storage systems (R series) is ATA based,
but is not a general fileserver.
Looking for cheaper than NetApp?
http://www.winsys.com/products/flata.php
Then use your favorite of UNIX systems (FreeBSD preferred by me) to be
your NFS server OS of choice. Simple. Mostly cheap.
Tell them I sent you.
--
Mike Horwath, reachable via [EMAIL PROTECTED]
