I'm interested in hearing any stories on how Netapps wins or loses your business. I'm currently shopping for storage and a Netapps filer seems to fit the bill. I've talked to other storage system vendors -- that big one, EMC (or is it Data General), MTI, and some others.
They all emphasize that: - SAN is the future of storage - Netapps and NFS is a lock in to old technology - Netapps is JBOD - that Eurologic is an unknown scrap vendor - Netapps are impossible to back up - RAID 4 is unreliable - WAFL is slow - WAFL is impossible to recover when it becomes corrupt - wack takes all day to report that you're still in trouble - the cluster failover takes too long - the cluster failover is unreliable at best - the Netapps performance is terribly slow - the software is big pile of patches that are impossible to keep track of
They've also given me references of companies that have switched from Netapps to other solutions.
In general three themes came from the references: - they lost data with Netapps. Why? Because they could not take a backup with their enterprise backup software and then they suffered a multiple disk failure from a set of disks with problem firmware.
I've seen a lot of griping on this least lately about backups. How much of a problem is the backup situation and does the situation become a problem when it requires a patch for the Netapps software that may introduce other instabilities?
- the Netapps filer was too slow for database use. I could understand how some of the storage arrays directly attached to a server could be faster. This isn't my application space, so I'm not outright concerned with it.
But, I have seen some of the recent messages on performance and throughput. How would you rate the Netapps for performance for things like home directory storage?
- the clustering did not work. Paid for cluster and the failover did not work as advertised.
This concerns me, because I am willing to pay the extra money for a cluster. As long as I'm shelling out, should I go to EMC for reliability or hope that the Netapps failover can work? I can get more Netapps for the money.
I'm not dumb enough to believe all of the claims that sales droids make. But, I'd like to hear some opinions as to what makes you buy Netapps, what keeps you on Netapps, and what will drive you away from Netapps.
--jeff skelton