Without knowing all your requirements that is a bit of a loaded question, however....

I agree with the specialization of iSilon storage, however I hear very good benchmark numbers from them.  If you need to do long sequential reads (ie. stream data) or do large grid computing they seem like a solid solution.  iirc they do not have all of the Snap(TM) type data mover technologies however.

I recently toured two data-center's of a very large social networking site (under NDA) and they are moving most their architecture away from NetApp and toward 3par.  They are however all FCP due to being a web facing shop who uses almost exclusive Windows, so once again it depends on the architecture.  I have also asked for a direct communication with their lead architect who claims "3par is faster" and we all know how subjective those claims are.  I am skeptical to say the least that the benchmarking they performed was actually under controlled unbiased conditions.

If you are worried about pure speed and benchmarks check out specbench.org and you can see some of the published numbers.  However, beware of the "iOPS" vendor fodder and drill into the benchmark statistics to do real comparisons.  Also I believe they only publish NFS numbers up there so that may or may not be applicable to your requirements.

I agree the SATA JBOD type solutions are attractive when going to management and making your case, but your management doesn't have to wake up at 2am when your storage solution dies.  ;)

Hope that helps.

On Apr 3, 2007, at 11:12 AM, Paul Letta wrote:

Hi Everyone,

  We are a long time NetApp shop here.  We started with the 540 and have upgraded multiple times and are now at FAS940's.  The time has come for us to upgrade again.

We have been extremely happy with NetApp. The reliability, uptime, support, features, etc. have spoiled us for years.

What I want to ask the community now is: has anyone else appeared on the stage that you are as happy with ?  There are  a lot of products that claim to have snapshots, NFS/CIFS, etc.  But how reliable are they ?

Has anyone that has been really happy with NetApps moved to any of the newer players and been as happy ?  My motivation looking elsewhere is, of course, price.  I admit, I have been slightly bitten by the cheap SATA file servers bug.  Our current config is with all FC drives, but if you have enough disks, SATA seems to be close to the performance.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what NetApp's real competitors are ?  Anyone have any stories to share with me about trying someone else (cheaper) ?

Thanks,

Paul Letta