+--- In our lifetime, Marc Nicholas marc@hippocampus.net wrote: | | I'm interested to hear what others think the shortcomings of the current | crop of NetApps are. From my experience: | | * Single logical drive
Hmm. We see this as a huge benefit. I like not having to juggle file system sizes.
| * Weedy SCSI performance
Not sure I understand what you mean. Compared to what, and in what way?
| * Lack of other RAID implementations
You mean like 0,0+1,etc? I think you need to read some of the white papers :)
If you are trying to make a comparison to something like ODS or an Auspex (stripping, concatenated stripes, raid5 (not on an Auspex you don't), mirroring), then that is not a good comparisson.
The "limitations" of the NetApp's are (IMHO) what make it so good. Not having to tweak and monitor 500 different parameters is most nice.
| * Not quite enough redundancy for truly mission critical applications
Such as HA, fail-over, etc? This is a valid concern but one that begs to be analyzed.
At first HA sounds great. The ability to have 1 machine completely die and have another pick up where the first left off (without any percieved interuption of service). The problem shows itself when the cost associated with this level of availability is determined. If you have 99.5% availability, what is the $$$ associated with the additional 0.5%? Then the bean counters take over... :)
I am looking forward to seeing the NetApp product continue to grow and address these concerns.
| Don't get me wrong, I love 'em :-)
As do we. I cannot wait to replace my f540's with f630's.
Alexei