Sounds good to me.
Being one of those 'small' accounts (120 people) what Tony suggests makes more sense than NetApp's current 'low-end' offerings. We've had to move away from NetApp (we have a 4 year old 450) even though we really like the product. The current product lineup gives much more than we need (and the price reflects that).
I guess I'd like an 'upgraded' (and Y2000 compliant) 450!
Regards
Mark Richards
Tony Paolucci wrote:
Dave Hitz hitz@netapp.com 02/24 9:32 AM >>>
To open a real can-of-worms, what would people on this list like to see in a low-end product offering? (Sub-$10k chassis).
This hypothetical discussion would be of great interest to me. :-)
I'll take a crack at it:
PC-ish Mini-tower not to exceed 19" high (so it could be rack mounted on its side) Lower-end Alpha or medium Intel processor (whatever's cheaper for NetApp) 256 MB RAM 4-8MB NVRAM Single 10/100 Ethernet Single SCSI Bus Up to 7 9GB (or larger?) disks A couple of PCI slots for other types of network interfaces, and/or SCSI Tape.
Make it one box, disks and all.
Don't worry about hot-swap or hot spare disks. If you're buying at this end of the market, down time probably costs you less than it does the big-boys. Instead, sell a cold-spare disk which sit on the shelf until they need it.
If it saves mfg costs, solder the memory, nvram & ethernet to the motherboard. Ship a single config.
With a max usable of +/- 50GB a box like this could be a departmental fileserver, or a NetCache box for small to medium organizations who don't need/want a big NetApp for the job.
I don't know how close this comes to the $10K figure. It's probably closer to $20K maxed with disks. Still, that's my .$.02 worth
Tony Paolucci System Administrator, Growth Management, Metro, Portland, Oregon