On Aug 4, 2008, at 8:04 AM, René Bormann wrote:
Hello Toasters,
we got an offer of DS14MK2 AT-FC Shelfs and now asking ourselfs if these are just for backupsystems like R200 or also for production with FAS920c.
Can anybody throw us some pro / cons?
As others have mentioned, the biggest difference between SATA vs FC, is that SATA disks are not suited for high performance workloads where transaction times matter.
What hasn't been mentioned is that in NetApp's implementation, SATA firmware updates require downtime, about 70 seconds. This means that not only are SATA components ill suited for high performance, they not a good fit for high uptime.
In spite of the lower performance and availability characteristics I use them liberally for primary CIFS, NFS, FCP, and iSCSI across at least 12 clusters. Its a matter of setting expectations for downtime, being able to monitor workload and ready to migrate to FC if needed.
-=--=- gerald villabroza <geraldv at stanford.edu> technical lead, its storage, stanford university