I'm liking the thread that John Stewart started about his filer replacement, so I decided to start my own. We too are faced with replacing our NetApp filers this year. We have and F720 (cifs file shares) and an F810 (cifs and iscsi). Both of these filers are maxed out both in disk space and processor. We had NetApp come up with a solution for us to replace these and the proposal is attractive. They put together a 3020 system for us that should meet both of our storage and processing needs for at least the next 2 years. So we budgeted for the replacement. Then the
Don't look at just the prices as the cost comparison.. because you aren't seeing all the costs associated with each solution. Think of it more as a reliable reputation vs innovative springboard type approach. Can your company afford possible downtimes? support that doesn't match up to NetApp? no resources like now.netapp.com docs? Recently went to a presentation that talked about Google implementing on the frontier stuff.. because they are willing to invest the time of their software engineers to write software that deals with reliability problems. NetApp isn't the only one in the market.. so the prices they set aren't arbitrary. When you look at the overall cost.. it's including a lot of the niceties that other new companies won't have.
My company Decru was recently bought by NetApp.. but I've always liked NetApp filers. Even though we are part of NetApp, we are actually partners with a lot of the storage vendors out there as our product needs to interoperate with them. The support, and technical knowhow that NetApp shared even in my early days at Caltech was excellent. If a disk was about to fail, they knew about it with autosupport and had the disk on its way before I even realized that there was a possible problem.
There are plenty of great solutions out in the market. Look carefully at the resources you have available to you.. the experience you have, and what time you have available for training on a new platform. Think about possible upgrade paths (check out their roadmap for the future).
Jennifer