I believe Neopath is also a good candidate. Very similar to Acopia, and a lot of ex- Netapp heads work there.
Regards, Max
drew> We are currently evaluating NuView and Rainfinity for their drew> ability to use a global name space through use of AD and DFS. drew> We have the need to virtualize shares from 1 server to multiple drew> filers. NuView seems to be the ticket, however Rainfinity seems drew> to be fairly similar. Any positive or negative feedback would drew> be appreciated.
We tried Rainfinity here (before I got here I admit) and it lost production data on us multiple times. We've since turned the box into a paperweight.
We're currently using Acopia (http://www.acopia.com) boxes to virtualize directories across back end storage. We're using strictly NFS for now, but we'll probably do CIFS as well at some point. They're a good company, and they're going to become a NetApp partner I hear, but not sure when that will happen. Their tech support staff is good too, quite responsive. We've got an open issue with them and NetApp about Distributed NFS on NetCaches. It doesn't work. Bummers...
In any case, there are gotchas with any sort of name space virtualization, esp if you depend on .snapshot functionality. Also, think about how you're going to do backups. If you backup the backend storage directly, and you have data spread across multiple backend servers, restores could be ... interesting. Or you can run your backups throug the Acopia, but then you have to give up NDMP and such. There are alot of tradeoffs here...
Or if you have data migrated from fast to slower/cheaper storage the longer it's not accessed, you want to make sure that such a migration doesn't happen when backups are running against the backend storage when the migration is happening. It probably won't crash your backup session, but it will probably complain.
John John Stoffel - Senior Staff Systems Administrator - System LSI Group Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. - http://www.toshiba.com/taec john.stoffel@taec.toshiba.com - 508-486-1087