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 unthinkable happened... 
 
My boss received a postcard from a company called Pillar Data.  He brought the postcard to me and said, "we should look at what these guys have."  The rest is history.  For those of you not familiar with Pillar Data, it's a startup of Larry Ellison's (the ORACLE Larry Ellison.)  They have a really neat product, and their QOS is quite impressive.  But I don't think that their product is mature enough yet for prime time.  After spending some time with their engineers and traveling to the Enterprise Technology Center in Atlanta to demo one of these solutions, I found some chinks in their armor.  I won't go into the details here, but if anyone wants to know what I've learned about them, I'll be happy to share that information. 
 
So this leads me to my question.  Has anyone heard of Pillar Data and if so I was wondering if you shared my opinion (or not) of their product?  I want to stick with the NetApp solution that was proposed, so I'm looking for ammunition to back up my argument.
 
Cheers.
 
 
Luther L. Allin IV, MCSE, ICSA
Network Systems Engineer
Miller & Martin PLLC
832 Georgia Avenue, Suite 1000
Chattanooga, TN  37402
lallin@millermartin.com
(423) 785-8381 (Direct)
(423) 321-1678 (Fax)
Atlanta-Chattanooga-Nashville
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