Jeffrey Skelton wrote:
I'm interested in hearing any stories on how Netapps wins or loses your business. I'm currently shopping for storage and a Netapps filer seems to fit the bill. I've talked to other storage system vendors -- that big one, EMC (or is it Data General), MTI, and some others.
They all emphasize that:
- SAN is the future of storage
This may be true but not written in stone, yet.
- Netapps and NFS is a lock in to old technology
But Netapp is just more than NFS. Try running CIFS and NFS on the same volume with an EMC.
- Netapps is JBOD
This person knows nothing of which he speeks and should be duely ignored for such an ignorant statement. If you wish to purchase product from a vendor that would flat out lie to you, be my guest.
- that Eurologic is an unknown scrap vendor
Eurologic joined SNIA this year to help drive the direction of SAN along with Netapp, EMC and Auspex. Erologic has also partnered with Seagate and DEC. Check www.erologic.com for more information on this company.
- Netapps are impossible to back up
Not so. There are many ways to backup a filer. The fasted by far is direct attached SCSI though. If investing in large filers, one might consider the use of DLT for backups.
- RAID 4 is unreliable
How much more reliable do you want to be? With a dedicated parity disk and hot spares available, the risk of loosing two disks at on the same volume at the same time is minimal. This has happened. It happened to me. It was fully detectable but I missed the warning sign becuase I became busy with other things.
- WAFL is slow
Most vendors pit their numbers for non-RAIDed disk against those of Netapps RAIDed disks and often lose. RAID for RAID, Netapp competes with the best of them.
- WAFL is impossible to recover when it becomes corrupt
Corruption is very rare because of the way Netapp "scrubs" this disks. In the event of corruption, the SE does have utilities avilable to him to try to fix the problem. I screwed up an OS down-grade once and had to call upon Netapp to bail me out. Giving the error messages over the phone to the support center, I was given instructions on what to do to resolve my problem. I was back in business before morning.
- wack takes all day to report that you're still in trouble
Not true. With larger file systems it does take longer, but one can run WACK several times in the same day to resolve these problems.
- the cluster failover takes too long
0:02:45. Timed it.
- the cluster failover is unreliable at best
It is true the there were some issues in the beginning. With the release of DOT 5.3.x, and the use of 18GB drives, I have not seen the same problems re-occur.
- the Netapps performance is terribly slow
We covered this already, I think.
- the software is big pile of patches that are impossible to keep track of
True. DOT is currently a big pile of patches that is difficult, at best, to track. Network Appliance has heard this complaint and is dealing with the situation.
They've also given me references of companies that have switched from Netapps to other solutions.
In general three themes came from the references:
they lost data with Netapps. Why? Because they could not take a backup with their enterprise backup software and then they suffered a multiple disk failure from a set of disks with problem firmware.
I've seen a lot of griping on this least lately about backups. How much of a problem is the backup situation and does the situation become a problem when it requires a patch for the Netapps software that may introduce other instabilities?
the Netapps filer was too slow for database use. I could understand how some of the storage arrays directly attached to a server could be faster. This isn't my application space, so I'm not outright concerned with it.
But, I have seen some of the recent messages on performance and throughput. How would you rate the Netapps for performance for things like home directory storage?
We are using F760s for home directory storage. There is no problem with this as a solution. Depending on the database application and the filer model, there could be a performance issue. I would not recomend using an F330 for large Oracle data structures. One realy needs to focus on Highend filers for large or very busy data bases.
the clustering did not work. Paid for cluster and the failover did not work as advertised.
This concerns me, because I am willing to pay the extra money for a cluster. As long as I'm shelling out, should I go to EMC for reliability or hope that the Netapps failover can work? I can get more Netapps for the money.
There are/were problems with the cluster failover process in the begining of DOT 5.2. There were situations where a failover would be initiated and the partner would panic. Most of these issues were addressed. Since installing DOT 5.3.x on our filers, we have not seen a partner panic situation occur.
I'm not dumb enough to believe all of the claims that sales droids make. But, I'd like to hear some opinions as to what makes you buy Netapps, what keeps you on Netapps, and what will drive you away from Netapps.
Network Appliance performs for us. We are a Engineering Design group. We moved to a dataless desktop environment for adminstrative reasons. All of our current storage is NetApp. Home directories, design directoryies and the very abusive simulation directories. We have a bank of LFS servers, U2s with multiple CPUs. The sole purpose of these systems is to run simulations of our designs. This bank of LFS servers brought, to its knees, our Auspex servers running over FDDI. We have not seen an F760 filer become bogged from our LFS servers, even when we were running in Fail-Over mode. The single head was able to keep up with the demand for both simulation filers.
We also make use of the snapshots that NetApp has. We use different schedules for different applications. Design data being our most important is snapshoted more often then home directories. Simulation do not receive snopshots at all.
If there is a problem, a call to 888-4-NETAPP, is usally all it takes to get the situation resolved. Sometimes the problem is more complex than can be handeled over the phone and an SE is dispatched. I like to do my own work and thus I like talking to the engineering staff in California to resolve my own problems. If I have a problem with getting support, I can call on my SE or Account Exec. to give support a push. I have had the same good relationship with Auspex as well though.
Network Appliance is customer oriented and I hope they stay that way. This is why I continue to recomend them to my management. By the way Jeff, if you buy a NetApp, tell Tom I want a part of the commission. :)
-gdg
--jeff skelton