1999-05-17-19:50:58 Jim McCoy:
NetApp charges a large premium over the raw costs of the disks and hardware to hook them together compared to what I could rig up with a PC and a few raid controllers, [...]
Personally, I disagree with this statement; if that were what NetApps sold, I'd never buy or recommend 'em.
Rather, NetApps sell two major things I am happy to pay for. I like their filesystem WAFL and the way it refuses to degrade in performance no matter how you abuse it, and of course I love the way they integrate a humongous battery-backed write cache.
I'm continuing to harbor this hope and prayer that Reiserfs may deliver the functionality I most prize in WAFL. I sure hope it plays nice with Linux's RAID. Then all I'd need is a nice integration of a battery-backed RAM board and voila, cheap appliances.
-Bennett