The F85 is a lower end solution, true. But poor data protection? Not hardly.
As for support, here's a real life example for ya....
Sometime over a weekend we had a disk fail (turned out to be Saturday afternoon around 4:00PM). The data was rebuilt on our hot spare and a replacement was at our S/R dock before I came in on Monday. No data loss, no issues.
I have had issues with tech support before, mostly costing me time before I got to the 2nd level engineer who understood the problem I was experiencing. But that will happen with anyone, guess who EMC has manning their first line of support? People who couldn't hack it at NetApp...)
The fact is, NetApp is the leader in NAS for a reason. Take what you will from that.
~JK
Barry Lustig wrote:
This is an excerpt of an email that was sent to the management of a company that I'm working with. They had spec'ed F85's for a fairly low performance 10-20Mbits/sec. environment. The main requirement is reliability and ease of use. How does one respond to blatant misrepresentation of a competitors product?
barry
A few highlights of the comparison:
- The F85 is a stripped down, single CPU, low end device with multiple
points of failure and a very poor data protection. NetApps service is rated very low by industry experts and they offer next day shipment of parts that the user must install themselves.
- The IP4700 is fully redundant, multi-CPU, mid-range device with no
single point of failure and hardware based RAID 5 data protection. EMC's world class customer service center has ranked #1 for 6 consecutive years by Gartner Group. Standard 2 year warranty guarantees 4 hours ON SITE w/Parts service by EMC technicians. Plus, our 'call home' proactive maintenance system monitors trends within the system and reports them automatically to our customer service center. Often, EMC technicians will repair a system BEFORE the component actually fails.
The 4700 will be configured with 8 drives usable, plus 1 drive for RAID 5 parity and 1 drive for hot swap redundancy. It is scalable all the way to 7000GB (7TB) vs. only 648GB for the F85. The 4700 as configured above is 8RU.
In general, the F85 does not scale sufficiently for growth, has poor customer service behind it, has no redundancy, has multiple points of failure, and utilizes a sub-par RAID 0 data protection scheme.