Fritz Feltner:
Thanks for the insight, Dave.
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However, what if I'm Mr Holiday Inn and I want to put toasters in 300 rooms?
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Perhaps our shop has finally outgrown the stage where appliance oriented filers are a practical solution.
And thanks for your insight! The issues you raise are very much on my mind these days. You won't be surprised to hear that I feel differently about appliance oriented filers. :-)
Because there are such strong similarities between filers and routers, both in terms of the technology itself, but even more importantly in terms of the underlying philosophy, I often look to Cisco for clues about what should be important to us at Network Appliance.
I believe that Cisco's focus evolved through three stages:
- Appliance (fast, simple, reliable) - Multiprotocol (supporting protocols for multiple OSs) - Network Infrastructure (managing lots of networks and lots of routers)
This analogy helped convince us to support the Windows/NT file service protocol (CIFS). It also makes me believe that our biggest challenge beyond multiprotocol filers is:
- Data Infrastructure (managing lots of data and lots of filers)
I actually believe that the appliance approach offers great advantages in this area. Nobody I've talked with thinks it would simplify their network infrastructure to replace routers with general purpose UNIX or NT servers. (Would Mr. Holiday Inn rather install 300 toasters, or 300 ovens?)
But we've obviously got work to do in this area. We've got many customers with dozens of filers, and quite a few of them have written scripts to assist with filer management. One has a script that connects to each filer every few minutes to gather performance statistics. Several have written scripts to install new software releases on lots of filers at once.
Improved filer monitoring and improved software upgrade are obvious areas for work, but I'm curious in hearing other people's thoughts.
I'm especially interested in hearing about scripts people have written. When people make the effort to develop a tool themselves, it is obviously important to them, and it probably indicates an area that we should address.
What scripts or tools have other people developed?
Dave