Brad, I was at similar presentations from the Data Robotics guys as Curtis (likely with the same Tech Field Day people), and while I have no where near the knowledge that he does, I did preface my statement with "general purpose cheap array". My goal for any place I would put a Drobo would be capacity, not sheer performance.
The "magic" underlying BeyondRAID has a lot of implications depending on the underlying devices and the filesystem that you put on top of it, but in most cases that I've heard of, it works just fine. I'm not saying I want use it to put ZFS on a bunch of flash disks, just that if I needed a few TB of iSCSI for a lab, it would definitely be on my list. --Matt On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 4:26 AM, Brad Knowles <[email protected]> wrote: > On Oct 29, 2010, at 8:29 PM, Matt Simmons wrote: > >> On the other hand, if I had to go with a general purpose cheap array, >> it would be hard to pick between ATAoE and the Drobo Elite iSCSI >> implementation. BeyondRAID is like magic. > > I know some of the top experts in the storage system field -- being friends > and a former co-worker with someone like W. Curtis Preston gets you into a > lot of places (and discussions) that you would never have seen before. > > When the Drobo stuff first came out, Curtis was all over it -- he thought it > was the best thing since sliced bread. > > Now that we've had a chance to hear from people who have their hands very > deep into filesystem code at various vendors, and we've learned a bit about > the magic that happens behind the curtains, I wish I hadn't bought mine. I > wish I had gone with Infrant ReadyNAS instead. > > Maybe not a slick, nor as magical, but a lot less > spit-and-bailing-wire-and-lots-of-prayer underneath the hood. And a lot less > stuff under the hood that scares the bejesus out of guys who really know > their filesystem code backwards and forwards. > > > These days, something like FreeNAS with running ZFS is looking mighty nice > for the SOHO market. I just wish someone would package something like this > into a nifty hardware box like Drobo has -- it wouldn't need much CPU and I > think it could handle the data protection and data migration almost as well > as Drobo makes it look. > > -- > Brad Knowles <[email protected]> > LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> > > -- LITTLE GIRL: But which cookie will you eat FIRST? COOKIE MONSTER: Me think you have misconception of cookie-eating process. _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
