Ladies & gentlemen, We use FAServers at our department since Feb. 1994. Since then we have had five units from model 450, F330 to F540. At one point or other our NFS clients were HP, Digital, IBM/RS6000, SGI, Convex, Apollo and even MAC (via Xinet software). Packages range from Cadence to Framemaker to other semiconductor manufacturing related simulators. We have documented uptime of over 99.7%, which includes scheduled downtime. Its truly a lights out operation. Needless to say I am a big fan of the product, to date. Yet, when a sisterly department was looking into NFS fileservers, FAServer was brushed off their short list, which included only SUN and Auspex. Even after two hours of discussion with one of the key IS member I still was in the dark on why FAServer was not even in the running.
From what little I could gather, the only sour note on FAServer
was "Network Appliance lack of industry standards"; whatever that means. My guess is that the other prominent players were pointing to the fact that FAServer file system is not "BSD or System5", their OS is not "UNIX" and so on and so forth. When I look at NetApp's brochure, there is no reference to any "standards" or their membership/affiliation to any of the scores of industry consortiums. I tried my best to get something in writing from NetApp stating their commitment on standards. Folks, I know this is absurd. But I had to do it. Anyway, NetApp conveniently ignored my request. So this is you mission, if you chose so... Please let me know if the alleged "lack of industry standards" effected your operations? If it's not against your company policy, it may help, in future, to know (a) what type of industry is this FAServer used? (b) how many FAServer and approximate total disk space? (c) which part of the world are this installed? (d) how important is standards based tools to your company and why you picked FAServer when they seems to be build on proprietary environment? (e) what is your performance and uptime experience with FAServers? (f) how critical is FAServer's uptime for your company/department's operation? (g) installed since when? (h) any experience you can share between FAServer and Auspex/SUN file servers?
Thanking you all in anticipation.
Philip Thomas Motorola - ACT, M/S M350 2200 W. Broadway M350 Mesa, AZ 85202 thomas@act.sps.mot.com rxjs80@email.sps.mot.com (602) 655-3678 (602) 655-2285 (fax)