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Replacing OUR NetApp
by Luther Allin 01 Feb '06

01 Feb '06

I'm liking the thread that John Stewart started about his filer replacement, so I decided to start my own. We too are faced with replacing our NetApp filers this year. We have and F720 (cifs file shares) and an F810 (cifs and iscsi). Both of these filers are maxed out both in disk space and processor. We had NetApp come up with a solution for us to replace these and the proposal is attractive. They put together a 3020 system for us that should meet both of our storage and processing needs for at least the next 2 years. So we budgeted for the replacement. Then the unthinkable happened... My boss received a postcard from a company called Pillar Data. He brought the postcard to me and said, "we should look at what these guys have." The rest is history. For those of you not familiar with Pillar Data, it's a startup of Larry Ellison's (the ORACLE Larry Ellison.) They have a really neat product, and their QOS is quite impressive. But I don't think that their product is mature enough yet for prime time. After spending some time with their engineers and traveling to the Enterprise Technology Center in Atlanta to demo one of these solutions, I found some chinks in their armor. I won't go into the details here, but if anyone wants to know what I've learned about them, I'll be happy to share that information. So this leads me to my question. Has anyone heard of Pillar Data and if so I was wondering if you shared my opinion (or not) of their product? I want to stick with the NetApp solution that was proposed, so I'm looking for ammunition to back up my argument. Cheers. Luther L. Allin IV, MCSE, ICSA Network Systems Engineer Miller & Martin PLLC <http://www.millermartin.com/> 832 Georgia Avenue, Suite 1000 Chattanooga, TN 37402 lallin(a)millermartin.com (423) 785-8381 (Direct) (423) 321-1678 (Fax) Atlanta-Chattanooga-Nashville - CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE - The information contained in this e-mail message is legally privileged and confidential, and is intended only for the use of the addressee. If you are not the intended recipient, please be aware that any dissemination, distribution or copy of this e-mail is prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please immediately notify us by reply e-mail and delete this message and any attachments. Thank you. Please also advise us immediately if you or your employer does not consent to receipt of Internet email for confidential messages of this kind.

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RE: Replacing our NetApp
by Michael Bergman 31 Jan '06

31 Jan '06

Derek Lai wrote: >Is there any reason you kept talking about SANs? SAN has its place, >especially if you need high end performance. But for a lot of >applications NAS works just fine. I agree. Use NFS. Configure it well. Build a "storage network" if you like, put in dedicated GbE switch(ws) (10 GbE?) with the Oracle server(s) and the NAS Filer(s) in it, make sure everything is Jumbo frames of course, tweak if for optimum performance as best possible, make sure traffic flows the way it should a.s.o. No client traffic on that net. Use ONTAP 7.x (aggregates) and have enough spindles. Go for the smaller drives probably, not the 144G's, but the 72's Most likely this will be Good Enough(TM) so you can stay away from complicated bug-ridden SAN setups that always are a nightmare to change config-wise. Especially if you need to change the config quite often in some way (= more than once a year...) Just my 0.10 SEK worth /M -- Michael Bergman Email: Michael.Bergman(a)ericsson.com Sr Systems Analyst EAB/OET/R, R&D IT Stockholm Phone: +46 8 7275709 R&D IT Management Armborstv 14, S-125 25 Alvsjo, Sweden -- "Qui vicit non est victor nisi victus fatetur." - Ennius

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Re: Replacing OUR NetApp
by Michael Bergman 31 Jan '06

31 Jan '06

>Ask Oracle what storage they use internally: NetApp or Pillar? >then decide. A good idea. Might work very well if they'll give a good 'n straight answer. My guess is they use both to some extent at least. >> My boss received a postcard from a company called Pillar Data. He >> brought the postcard to me and said, "we should look at what these guys >> have." Sounds good and fair enough -- to look at what those guys have. >> I don't think that their product is mature enough yet for prime time. >> After spending some time with their engineers and traveling to the >> Enterprise Technology Center in Atlanta to demo one of these solutions, >> I found some chinks in their armor. I won't go into the details here, So you've looked at them (I know about them as well, but have in no way looked closer), and you've made your conclusions. It sounds like a reasonable conclusion to me; they're not mature enough yet for prime time whatever the definition of that might be in your case. God knows, NetApp Filer's weren't ready for that in the beginning, nor when they first started with FC backends (i.e. when they left SCSI for good) either! Just ask YahooMail about what it was like back in those days, jan-may 1999... >> I want to stick with the NetApp solution that was proposed, so I'm >> looking for ammunition to back up my argument. Well, you have all the ammo you need IMO. All the ammo that *should* be needed. You looked properly at Pillar, have concluded that they're not mature enough yet for prime time. Are you saying that your boss knows more than you or does he have such a good business case to make him a hero that it is "OK" with these systems not having as good, or much worse, availability, flexibility, ease of admin and performance? If so, then you have my pity. If your boss doesn't trust you (assuming he's not a better Subject Matter Expert himself than you are) your situation is certainly not good. Best of luck - in this situation I'd do exactly whay you want to do, i.e. stick with the NetApp solution. Do *not* go out on the bleeding edge, unless you must for a very good reason, for "prime time" stuff as you put it. It hurts. /M -- Michael Bergman Email: Michael.Bergman(a)ericsson.com Sr Systems Analyst EAB/OET/R, R&D IT Stockholm Phone: +46 8 7275709 R&D IT Management Armborstv 14, S-125 25 Alvsjo, Sweden -- "Utinam tam facile vera invenire possem quam falsa convincere!" - Cicero

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RE: Replacing our NetApp
by Lai, Derek 31 Jan '06

31 Jan '06

Is there any reason you kept talking about SANs? SAN has its place, especially if you need high end performance. But for a lot of applications NAS works just fine. We have a big Oracle running on NetApp 940 Cluster and it's been working great. Most of the time it is the spindle count that matters, not NAS vs. SAN. Derek -----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters(a)mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Stewart, John Sent: Monday, January 30, 2006 3:11 PM To: Stewart, John; 'toasters(a)mathworks.com' Subject: RE: Replacing our NetApp Hey all; thanks for the many great responses. We have our NetApp vendor coming in tomorrow, and we'll discuss their SAN solutions then. thanks! johnS

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RE: LDAP mapping
by Graeme Fowler 31 Jan '06

31 Jan '06

Hi all Thanks for the responses so far. On 31 January 2006 07:38, owner-toasters(a)mathworks.com wrote: > FWIW Windows 2003 R2 uses the RFC 2307 schema, so the only mappings > you need are for homeDirectory and the object classes. > > (homeDirectory is necessary owing to the same attribute being used by > AD, so R2/Vintela/XAD use unixHomeDirectory instead.) Hrm... This isn't a W2k3 R2 setup - noting that most of the work is being done in a dev lab before going to production, so this may change. We're running W2K3 server with Microsoft's SFU3.5 installed. Although it's installed, we're really only using the schema extensions - we shot NIS out of the equation after suffering some terrible map reliability some time ago, and we found that PAM_ldap and nss_ldap worked perfectly for us from a Linux/UNIX workstation & server perspective. We also don't really want to have to use the NFS client, although to be honest this might be looking like one way to proceed. Of which, more if it happens... Anyway, back on track: After taking note of http://now.netapp.com/NOW/cgi-bin/bol?Type=Detail&Display=16619 (login required) I managed to get rid of one source of error (STATUS_ACCESS_DENIED trying to look up domain groups). However, the username mapping is still not working. Can someone with LDAP username mapping please post (or email privately) the "options ldap" output as used against an SFU3.5 extended AD schema? I appreciate that Outdoorchik2 has posted one, but any others for comparison would be helpful... Graeme -- Graeme Fowler Hosting Development Engineer PIPEX This e-mail is subject to: http://www.pipex.net/disclaimer.html

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31 Jan '06

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RE: Replacing our NetApp
by Carter K. George 31 Jan '06

31 Jan '06

Oracle over NFS is a very viable option. Now that there are scalable NFS solutoins based on cluster file systems (eg, Hewlett Packard EFS Cluster Gateway), you can scale out NFS performance in the exactly the same way that Oracle scales out RAC. Multiple nodes can access shared storage concurrently, and failover is completely transparent. So there's no reason, going forward, that Oracle over NFs can't be as fast or faster than block level protocols and even more fault tolerant. Here's a list of the currently OSCP certified Oracle-over-NFS solution providers, including NetApps: http://www.oracle.com/technology/deploy/availability/htdocs/vendors.html -----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters(a)mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Max Sent: Monday, January 30, 2006 4:59 PM To: genec00(a)comcast.net Cc: toasters(a)mathworks.com; 'Peter D. Gray'; Stewart, John Subject: Re: Replacing our NetApp On Jan 30, 2006, at 3:28 PM, genO wrote: > > > great point...heard something about Oracle using Netapp over NFS in > one of their hosting centers? not real sure if I got that right. we > don't use oracle. You can generally run Oracle No problem over NFS. However, generally you often do get higher performance with block level access, the trade off until recently has been management complexity and systems scalability (No Cluster File System.) There is no really good general rule to apply to the situation here. These days customers should be able to chose a single box that supports whatever interconnect and data protocol they're used to using. IF the DBA's are crusty, old guys they'll probably insist on a block level transport. And Netapp makes a *great* SAN/NAS combo. The only weaknesses for a consolidated Netapp might be more disk overhead for LUNs, RAID 4 or RAID DP only (no legacy raid levels... again something ancient, haggard and crusty DBA's insist on...) In the event that the Netapp NAS/SAN doesn't work for you, you can Still use a Vfiler for your NAS needs... :) And if your salty DBA finally breaks down and begins to trust modern technology, you can migrate the databases to LUN that is being exported by the vfiler:) Regards, Max > good question for your guys tomorrow... > > good luck, > > g > -----Original Message----- > From: Peter D. Gray [mailto:pdg@uow.edu.au] > Sent: Monday, January 30, 2006 6:01 PM > To: Stewart, John > Cc: 'toasters(a)mathworks.com' > Subject: Re: Replacing our NetApp > > On Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 02:22:20PM -0800, Max wrote: >>> >> >> This box is probably something that Sun put together after the Procom >> buyout, and I've never been impressed by most of the Procom kit. >> > > We had no end of problems with our procoms. We ended up replacing all > of them with netapps. Never looked back. > > >> Another NAS head option you may want to consider is a Netapp Vfiler.. >> that way you can have the best of both worlds. >> >> What Model of Sun SAN are you looking at? >> > > Why do SAN at all? If you have used NAS with netapp, why on earth > would you > move to a SAN? We run everything on our netapps and could not be > happier. > > Regards, > pdg > > -- > > See mail headers for contact information. > >

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RE: Replacing our NetApp
by Carter K. George 31 Jan '06

31 Jan '06

That's because the Sun NAS Gateway does not run Solaris, it runs a proprietary and not well-adopted "storage-optimized" OS They got from Procomm. So all the work Sun has done on v4 has been, of course, on Solaris. Since v4 is not just a few extra bells And whistles on v3, but a whole new on-the-wire protocol, stateful instead of stateless, it is a lot of work to write an NFS v4 server from scratch for Your own weird OS...though most of these so-called NAS OS's are just some variant of FreeBSD with a different file system. Carter -----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters(a)mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Luke Howard Sent: Monday, January 30, 2006 11:42 PM To: toasters(a)mathworks.com Subject: Re: Replacing our NetApp >Part of it would be to replace the NetApp with a Sun 5310 NAS Gateway: > >http://www.sun.com/storage/5000/5300/5310gateway/index.xml It's odd (looking at the data sheets) that it doesn't support NFSv4, given Sun's history with the protocol. -- Luke --

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Re: Replacing our NetApp
by Luke Howard 31 Jan '06

31 Jan '06

>Part of it would be to replace the NetApp with a Sun 5310 NAS Gateway: > >http://www.sun.com/storage/5000/5300/5310gateway/index.xml It's odd (looking at the data sheets) that it doesn't support NFSv4, given Sun's history with the protocol. -- Luke -- attribute being used by AD, so R2/Vintela/XAD use unixHomeDirectory instead.) -- Luke --

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RE: Replacing our NetApp
by Alan Biren 31 Jan '06

31 Jan '06

You can always have your crusty DBA contact Oracle and see what they use. Most likely it is NetApp Storage with NFS. I have several customers running Oracle with NFS, and there are still those that insist on FCP with the possibility of converting them to iSCSI on the QA side. Good Luck ________________________________ From: owner-toasters(a)mathworks.com on behalf of Max Sent: Mon 1/30/2006 7:59 PM To: genec00(a)comcast.net Cc: toasters(a)mathworks.com; 'Peter D. Gray'; Stewart, John Subject: Re: Replacing our NetApp On Jan 30, 2006, at 3:28 PM, genO wrote: > > > great point...heard something about Oracle using Netapp over NFS in > one of > their hosting centers? not real sure if I got that right. we don't > use > oracle. You can generally run Oracle No problem over NFS. However, generally you often do get higher performance with block level access, the trade off until recently has been management complexity and systems scalability (No Cluster File System.) There is no really good general rule to apply to the situation here. These days customers should be able to chose a single box that supports whatever interconnect and data protocol they're used to using. IF the DBA's are crusty, old guys they'll probably insist on a block level transport. And Netapp makes a *great* SAN/NAS combo. The only weaknesses for a consolidated Netapp might be more disk overhead for LUNs, RAID 4 or RAID DP only (no legacy raid levels... again something ancient, haggard and crusty DBA's insist on...) In the event that the Netapp NAS/SAN doesn't work for you, you can Still use a Vfiler for your NAS needs... :) And if your salty DBA finally breaks down and begins to trust modern technology, you can migrate the databases to LUN that is being exported by the vfiler:) Regards, Max > good question for your guys tomorrow... > > good luck, > > g > -----Original Message----- > From: Peter D. Gray [mailto:pdg@uow.edu.au] > Sent: Monday, January 30, 2006 6:01 PM > To: Stewart, John > Cc: 'toasters(a)mathworks.com' > Subject: Re: Replacing our NetApp > > On Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 02:22:20PM -0800, Max wrote: >>> >> >> This box is probably something that Sun put together after the Procom >> buyout, and I've never been impressed by most of the Procom kit. >> > > We had no end of problems with our procoms. We ended up replacing all > of > them with netapps. Never looked back. > > >> Another NAS head option you may want to consider is a Netapp Vfiler.. >> that way you can have the best of both worlds. >> >> What Model of Sun SAN are you looking at? >> > > Why do SAN at all? If you have used NAS with netapp, why on earth > would you > move to a SAN? We run everything on our netapps and could not be > happier. > > Regards, > pdg > > -- > > See mail headers for contact information. > > ***************************************************************************************************** Note: ASI System Integration Inc, is located at 48 West 37th Street, New York, NY 10018. The contents of this email and any attachments are confidential. It is intended for the named recipient(s) only. If you have received this email in error please notify the system manager or the sender immediately and do not disclose the contents to anyone or make copies. ** eSafe scanned this email for viruses, vandals or malicious content ** *****************************************************************************************************

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