Jeff, Glen,
here at TI Europe we're also using NetApp Filers (740, 630, 330 in Germany, 720 in Northampton, 5xx in Stockholm).
Let me give a few comments:
They all emphasize that:
- SAN is the future of storage
This may be true but not written in stone, yet.
For a distributed computing environment NFS is still the only state-of-the-art choice for file access. In an engineering environment with many user workstations accessing a few fileservers and some more computeservers you need a filesystem oriented protocol like NFS - there is currently no other standardized way to do it.
SAN solutions make sense i.e. for applcation and database servers accessing different volumes on one SAN storage system, but, in our case it really doesn't make sense to access each workstation with a separate filer line instead of using the existing IP network.
What SAN vendors do is saling separate fileservers on top of the SAN architecture - comparable to EMC's Celerra. But also these fileservers will use NFS.
- Netapps and NFS is a lock in to old technology
But Netapp is just more than NFS. Try running CIFS and NFS on the same volume with an EMC.
With the Celerra it shouldn't be a problem...
- Netapps are impossible to back up
Not so. There are many ways to backup a filer. The fasted by far is direct attached SCSI though. If investing in large filers, one might consider the use of DLT for backups.
In a larger environment you probably don't want to backup each fileserver separately with an attached DLT. And as NetApp doesn't support a reasonable NDMP version which allows backup over the net the only way to do a central backup is through NFS - not a very smart solution.
- RAID 4 is unreliable
How much more reliable do you want to be? With a dedicated parity disk and hot spares available, the risk of loosing two disks at on the same volume at the same time is minimal. This has happened. It happened to me. It was fully detectable but I missed the warning sign becuase I became busy with other things.
- WAFL is slow
Most vendors pit their numbers for non-RAIDed disk against those of Netapps RAIDed disks and often lose. RAID for RAID, Netapp competes with the best of them.
I think RAID4/RAID5 is cannot be as performant as RAID1 (Mirror), because the parity bits need to be recalculated for every bit written. But, NetApp did a good job in optimizing their systems for RAID4, so the F760 i.e. is still one of the fastest dedicated file servers - see http://open.specbench.org/osg/sfs/results/ for a more detailed information.
If there is a problem, a call to 888-4-NETAPP, is usally all it takes to get the situation resolved. Sometimes the problem is more complex than can be handeled over the phone and an SE is dispatched. I like to do my own work and thus I like talking to the engineering staff in California to resolve my own problems. If I have a problem with getting support, I can call on my SE or Account Exec. to give support a push. I have had the same good relationship with Auspex as well though.
Network Appliance is customer oriented and I hope they stay that way. This is why I continue to recomend them to my management. By the way
With the above I've my problems. At least Network Appliance Germany is NOT very customer oriented but very sales oriented. It took about 4 months until our F330 which was sporadicly rebooting ~once the week was exchanged and we had to go until the highest management level to get the exchange. The suggested solution before the exchange was "buy a new system, the F330 is outdated" or "your network or UPS may be responsible for that, so get it fixed." In other words, and not only in this case, the European NetApp support is NOT satisfying - the Auspex support is much better.
And here we're at the second problem. NetApp's servers are not expensive, but you'll see this with the H/W. In the last year we had
- 1 defect SCSI card - 2 defect FCAL cards - 4 defect network cards (the last one, a GigaBit card, was dead on arrival) - a few defect disks - a defective power supply (fan died)
To be prepared for those problems you'll have to BUY a so called "spares kit" with all possibles spare parts for a lot of money.
Additional, in a few cases a NetApp died without a reboot or any diagnostic result - just reboot it manually, and it works again... ... and in a few cases a disk died but no automatic recontruct started. NetApp didn't find out why - I think they didn't investigate very hard.
So, in a conclusion, you can't bypass NFS, NetApps NFS servers are performant, not expensive NFS/CIFS servers, but not very reliable. No chance for 99% uptime.
Best regards,