On Thu, 15 Jan 1998, Alexei Rodriguez wrote:
Indeed. My question for NetApp now is, are they looking at the 47GB drives? This is more out of curiosity than a demand for them. It seems that drives this large are too big a liability. Imagine how long it would take to rebuild?
I don't know if I'd trust having that many drives of that size crammed into a DEC or Eurologics enclosure. Anyone know what the heat output is on one of those things? Coming from Seagate, I shudder to think how much air flow will be needed to dissipate the heat from constantly running drives...
We went with the additional power brick (in the old style shelves). While it is good that we can have dual PS, giving up a slot in each shelf has been quite painful.
Unfortunately, I can't do that with our news spools (filled right up with drives, as you can imagine). We're planning on doubling up the power supplies on our mail spool shelves, where we have lots of room for expansion.
Having seen what Sun's "vision" of the storage architecture will be, I am curious as to what NetApp's reaction will be to some of these upcoming threats. The A5000 is not a bad unit. Sun is making it clear that they will not shoot themselves in the foot with it; you cannot get the Fibre Channel adapter for anything smaller than an E3000 (these E450's are amazing boxes; a bit too heavy).
I can't imagine Netapp *not* offering a fiber-channel solution this year. More devices, more speed, more fault tolerance, longer loops, etc. BTW, Invincible's Lifeline NFS servers have some very nice HA features I'd like to see in a Netapp.