Kelsey Cummings wrote:
I'm using NAS for stabilty, reliabilty, easy of use and, performance in that order. Does anyone beat NetApp on these issues?
If I had different performance requirements I might have different opinions.
-K
I agree to your opinion that the NetApp filers are unbeaten if they are used in the midrange area. You are really lucky that this is your range. You found the best solution for your demand. :-)
But I know some people that are desperately waiting for new, much faster filers.
If you really need highend performance, than there are not many vendors, models and "solutions" left. :-(
Moving fileservices from a big mainframe (with a bad instable CIFS-stack freezing the whole mainframe incl. the databases from time to time ...) to a filer is only possible if the filer doesn't freeze or panic when it gets the same highend NAS load. :-( If not, then your first two values "stability" and "reliability" are immediately gone. One of my "favourites" is NOW Bug ID 128721.
Even the Gateway Filers are no solution for this problem. The FAS980 RAM size of 8 GByte is ridiculous small for managing up to 96 TByte of data and a high IO-demand. Especially if you compare these 8GByte to the other highend systems: IBM (128 GByte) , Panasas (240), Exanet (72). Even Spinnaker have 24 GByte... These systems are handling the SPEC benchmarks from the RAM cache ... ;-)
=> We need a WAFL based Spinnaker.
But NetApp already knows and they working on it. :-)
Best regards Dirk