David B. Ritch writes:
I know that in our environment, a small low-cost filer would not be terribly interesting. The F540 was the first NetApp that looked really useful to us.
From my point of view, I need (1) reliable (2) remotely admin'able (3) performance (4) capacity; in that order.
My company is not that big: 30 users when I installed our F330 in 1995, about 200 users now. But it is geographically diverse: I tend machines in Toronto (3 separate sites), Oakville, Pittsburgh, Atlanta and Paris (and I've never left Toronto :-).
Even with only 30 users, the F330 made sense because we need 100% uptime.
I only have two NetApps in two locations in Toronto, and only because I couldn't justify the cost of more NetApps. If available, lower-cost entry-level NetApps would go into all my other sites.
I believe that there is more to it than the issues of resellers and dealing with mass market. On a small network, it is typically more cost-effective to simply add a disk or two to an existing machine.
Yeah, we used to do that (before the F330). It killed our productivity. We had weekly server hangs and crashes. I had to drive back downtown after hours to reset so-called servers (workstations with SCSI disks hanging off of them).
Even now I have to talk somebody in Paris through restarting their BSD NFS server every once in a while. When I have to add a disk to that box, I'll have to send somebody over there from Toronto. On the other hand, if it was a NetApp...
Filers, like routers, are specialized. In a small environment, it is typically more cost-effective to combine network services on a small number of less specialized servers.
My favourite number of servers for a site is one. I settle for two because NetApps don't do SMTP, DNS, DHCP, etc. :-) I pair a NetBSD box with a NetApp to create a tiny perfect server environment. That handles all my UNIX, PC and Mac users.
In a larger environment, a small low-cost filer would not be particularly interesting
- you need performance.
I agree with that, but in a larger environment (eg ISP) *all* the rules change don't they?
-bmw | Double helix in the sky tonight | Throw out the hardware | Let's do it right -- Steely Dan; Aja