Side note for the EMC NAS. Watch your lun size. EMC NDMP is a "special" re-written version of NDMP... We had issues with anything over 1.5TB spinning from tape.
Also in a DR situation you can only restore to the same "frame type"(cx600 can't restore to a cx700 etc) and the frames have to be running the same FLAIR code as the one the tapes were spun off of.
Please Re-evaluate these comments (they may have fixed things after our issues occurred)
-----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of David Vosburgh Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2007 6:13 AM To: letta@jlab.org Cc: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Re: If not NetApp, then who ?
Paul Letta wrote:
Hi Everyone,
We are a long time NetApp shop here. We started with the 540 and
have
upgraded multiple times and are now at FAS940's. The time has come
for
us to upgrade again.
We have been extremely happy with NetApp. The reliability, uptime, support, features, etc. have spoiled us for years.
What I want to ask the community now is: has anyone else appeared on
the
stage that you are as happy with ? There are a lot of products that claim to have snapshots, NFS/CIFS, etc. But how reliable are they ?
Has anyone that has been really happy with NetApps moved to any of the
newer players and been as happy ? My motivation looking elsewhere is,
of course, price. I admit, I have been slightly bitten by the cheap SATA file servers bug. Our current config is with all FC drives, but
if
you have enough disks, SATA seems to be close to the performance.
Does anyone have any suggestions as to what NetApp's real competitors are ? Anyone have any stories to share with me about trying someone else (cheaper) ?
Thanks,
Paul Letta
We recently purchased a Clariion/Celerra filer to replace a bunch of older F760 filers. AFAIK, EMC was able to hit a price point that NetApp
would/could not. Not sure if anything else entered into the decision making process. Here are some observations (in no particular order) after the first six weeks:
1) the learning curve for the EMC filer is steeper than a NetApp: you really have to learn two pieces of hardware, the Clariion SAN and the Celerra NAS heads. They are in no way integrated together. 2) Celerra data movers are not active-active, so one of the expensive heads sits there doing nothing. 3) Clariion/Celerra is more complicated design: Clariion backend storage, two Celerra data movers, and a control station (two if you want
redundancy) to manage the data movers. 4) Celerra web interface is buggy: we've used a number of browsers, including the recommended IE6, to admin the Celerra and they all will periodically freeze. 5) occasional strange behavior on the Celerra: a) our first attempt at a
manual data mover failover resulted in a hung datamover and no failover;
b) luns presented to the Celerra sometimes to not appear after a rescan,
and have to be manually removed and rescanned from the CLI (which does seem reliable) 6) overly complex configuration: the Clariion/Celerra solution has loads
more configuration options than the NetApp, which means you have to learn about each of these to make intelligent decisions 7) we run lots of Oracle DB's, and occasionally we'll have a system go down suddenly. NFS locks don't get released and the DB won't start. On the NetApp you can release locks for a particular host, and you're good to go. On the Celerra, you have to unmount/mount the file system on the
data mover, affecting access to everyone using that filesystem. 8) resolution of cases with EMC has been very quick: I would say you get
to competent technical help faster than with NetApp.
As with most things in life, you get what you pay for.
Dave Vosburgh