Coming from a very large social networking site myself, I'd have a hard time doing what I do without NetApp. I'm with Mark, and stick with what you know. One of the best things about Netapp is that you can just swap out heads for upgrades easy, and each new head has more capacity so add your new shelves to a new head, and keep your exisiting shelves. Saves you the trouble of data migration too.
If you are set on a forklift, Onstor isn't a bad way to go. I have a few, and they've been pretty easy to use, and adapt to (and I'm a big netapp fan). They've had their issues, but not horrible terrible ones. Just annoying. I hear the marriage of 3par and OnStor is fantastic, but I've not seen it with my own eyes (yet).
But by far, if I had to start over again with architecture, I'd lean on Isilon. They are a little pricey, but you get a lot of nice things. Very highly available, bolt on more performance, or capacity, and fantastic ease of use. We actually got Ganglia on the cluster nodes itself so it looks and feels just like a typical cluster to us. And it's been rock solid pushing more then 1.2 GB / sec (yes gigabytes per second). I've not compared it to GX, maybe I will in a few more revs of that product.
-Blake
On 4/4/07, Max Reid max.reid@saikonetworks.com wrote:
I recently toured two data-center's of a very large social networking site
MySpace? =)
(under NDA) and they are moving most their architecture away
from NetApp and toward 3par. They are however all FCP due to being a web facing shop who uses almost exclusive Windows, so once again it depends on the architecture.
The problem with the MySpace approach is that it is guaranteed to be far more expensive than a similar ONTAP setup (A multinode GX system.), not the kind of infrastructure model to adopt if you're looking to *cut* costs.
Regards, Max