Pros: 1.. Their CEO is fairly well known in the industry. 2.. Microsoft Gold Partner 3.. Won an award from Leading Lights (same publishing group that publishes Byte and Switch)
Cons: 1.. Expensive: The ARX1000 lists for $45,000; the ARX6000 lists for $150,000. You'll need two of them to provide redundancy, so you'll need to double both of these prices. 2.. Proprietary file system 3.. In-band solution: depends on who you ask, but this can directly impact your network utilization (Of course, Acopia will cite a report they paid to have done by ESG (Steve Duplessie group) that states "no impact on network, etc. There aren't enough installations (last I heard they had less than 15 actual customers). 4.. Used mostly for file migration and then the appliance is ripped out and moved to the next location for migration of files. I'm not aware of anyone using it for global namespace purposes. 5.. Can't leverage the current computer resources one already has, rather you're paying extra for the hardware. You also can't upgrade the hardware as you see fit, rather you'd need to upgrade to a different switch. 6.. Partners with NetApp, but not OEM'd by them.
Have you already evaluated using VFM software to do this? 1.. It's more cost-effective than Acopia 2.. Sold and supported by NetApp 3.. Provides support for NetApp and Microsoft snapshots and more. 4.. Software suite of applications that provide policy-based global namespace, migration, archiving, DR, namespace backup/restore, data classfication & reporting. 5.. Award-winning (has won three major industry awards in the past couple of months) 6.. Out-of-band solution that won't impact the network 7.. Standards-based 8.. You can actually try it before you buy it versus going through a huge "selection" process to get an Acopia switch in-house to test in your environment. Download is available.
----- Original Message ----- From: Venkat Appineni To: toasters@mathworks.com Sent: Wednesday, May 18, 2005 4:44 PM Subject: Experience with Acopia
We are planning to use Acopia networks ARX switches to provide global name space to bunch of filers. Has anyone used them before ? Any pros and cons ?
-Venkat