The Mylex eXtremeRAIDs are very nice, and can resize the volumes on the fly. But resizing Ext2/3 is a pain, I know, because it is a traditional filesystem with pre-laid Inodes. I like the NetApp way with Inode creation on the fly.
Actually, it doesn't do it on the fly per se, it can just put file anywhere. You still have to monitor inode usage and increase the number of files when needed (just a simple command).
Multiple PCI channel and memory on x86 is getting mighty cheap. In fact, some people have commented that the Alpha in the NetApp gets saturated with duties under high-load conditions.
This is just a red herring. What doesn't get saturated under high-load conditions?? That's what high-load means!!
It doesn't matter how many PCI channels you have; if you overload your Linux server it'll get slow too. If they are overloading their Netapp, they need a faster Netapp (or another one).
and also the filesystem on Linux will still be Unix-based, and will not be able to maintain NT ACLs etc.
So I can assign multiple users/groups to a file in NetApp's CIFS support?
Yes.
Does it support all NT permissions?
Yes.
I can modify NT ACLs with Samba, but only for the user/group/other (Samba maps NT ACLs to UNIX equivalents).
Netapp also provides mapping capabilities.
Bruce