We were an early adopter of ONStor. I really enjoyed administering and using the system, the CLI interface is very nice. It has nice features like nested directory quotas and load balancing of it's virtual servers (think VMWare VMotion for filers). Plus they were fast, but that could have been partly due to the 3PAR array we had as the backend.
I've only used the first generation product and unfortunately will never use another here after an NDMP bug hit us hard and corrupted a file system. After this, management ponied up the money for NetApp again to replace the ONStor.
Since that time, ONStor hired off some of NetApp's engineering folks and has really improved their quality, so I wouldn't be afraid to give them a try again, but as long as the money people here will pay for NetApp, I'd rather have NetApp.
-- /* wes hardin */ Dallas Semiconductor/Maxim Integrated Products
Max Reid wrote:
Hi Everyone,
We are a long time NetApp shop here. We started with the 540 and have upgraded multiple times and are now at FAS940's. The time has come for us to upgrade again.
We have been extremely happy with NetApp. The reliability, uptime, support, features, etc. have spoiled us for years.
What I want to ask the community now is: has anyone else appeared on the stage that you are as happy with ? There are a lot of products that claim to have snapshots, NFS/CIFS, etc. But how reliable are they ?
I'm finally hearing decent things about BlueARC after many years of hearing bad things about them :) if you're a pure NAS/iSCSI/Ethernet shop, they might be worth taking a look at.
Someone I trust mentioned they really liked Isilon's stuff, but that gear seems to be a niche fit for Compute farm setups instead of "General" purpose storage.
ONstor is another ONTAP like creature, but they just sell gateway products AFAIK... Still need to source disk from somewhere (Netapp :)
Sun bought procom and now has ZFS, once (and if) they get their act together they may put out something decent, but It's hard to say with Sun given their track record in the space. From what I've seen, they have a lot of work to do.
Regards, Max
Has anyone that has been really happy with NetApps moved to any of the newer players and been as happy ? My motivation looking elsewhere is, of course, price. I admit, I have been slightly bitten by the cheap SATA file servers bug. Our current config is with all FC drives, but if you have enough disks, SATA seems to be close to the performance.
Does anyone have any suggestions as to what NetApp's real competitors are ? Anyone have any stories to share with me about trying someone else (cheaper) ?
Thanks,
Paul Letta