Kinda humorous in a wistful sense.
I started at NetApp in January '94, 18th person in the door.
We were a start-up company, I came from Mother Sun. It wasn't long before the sys admin team consisted on Byron Rakitzis (employee number 4 - first non-founder, developmwent engineer), Brian Ehrmantraut (hired immediately before me, development), I suspect Bruce Clarke (director of customer service) and myself.
One really cool thing about NetApp was the company ran on a single FAServer 400 (is that right model # for first box?).
It certainly was the least of our administration issues:-) (Though the F330 design for serviceability grew from customer support and internal management of that box).
Anyway - if you're a part time admin, perchance you want to minimize the amount of care and feeding of file servers. And anything else you possibly can.
I remember the Internet connections giving us the most stomach upset.
beepy
Bruce,
One of the items that I did not mention was that we are a start up company that is using the back-end infrastructure of our parent company. I have been given the task of not only buying a NAS device for company wide storage, but also to build the entire network infrastructure and server infrastructure for our new location. So, what ever we purchase will need to go online immediately and support the company in a new location. I don't have the "test-bed" to test anything.
As you can also guess, via my title, I am not a MIS person either. So, I've been going through a fairly steep learning curve in many areas. I am weary about compatibility issues with NFS and our engineering/CAD Sun machines. In this area, I feel because of their industry experience, NetApp has the edge. I've talked with EMC on this issue, and they re-assure me that the IP4700 will not have compatibility problems. However, this is much different than having users of the product claim that their are no compatibility problems.
My gut feeling is to go with the F740 because of the existing installation base, and the maturity of the product. I'm just a little miffed that NetApp has been trying to use my inexperience and limited knowledgebase against me during the sales process; it doesn't give me the feeling that I can trust them.
Chris Van Genderen Software Engineer & Applications Manager NexFlash Technologies, Inc. chris_van_genderen@nexflash.com
"Bruce Sterling To: <toasters@mathworks.com>, <Chris_Van_Genderen@NexFlash.com> Woodcock" cc: (bcc: Chris Van Genderen/Santa Clara/ISSIHQ) <sirbruce@ix.n Subject: Re: EMC IP4700 vs NetApp F740 etcom.com> 05/09/01 03:45 PMMost of what you seem to be weighing are nebulous issues of who says what. Why don't you just find out for yourself?
Ask Netapp for an F760 to try out for 2 weeks.
Ask EMC for an IP4700 *at the equivalent price and disk capacity, with RAID* to try out for 2 weeks.
See which has better performance for your users and which you can administer easier. Build large RAID groups, test simultaneous file sharing from NFS and CIFS, fail drives, do rebuilds, etc.
Bruce