On Wed, 16 Feb 2000, Bruce Sterling Woodcock wrote:
Another point: Is buying and attaching all that disk to the SUN systems really cheaper than simply attaching a local tape drive?
You mean a local tape drive to each Netapp? A terabyte of local disk (24x50GB Barracudas, Kingston Datasilo enclosures, hot-swap canisters, cabling) only costs about $40000. 12 tape libraries (one per Netapp) would cost much more than that, and I'd rather deal with a couple of Exabyte X80's than, say, a dozen EXB-220's.
And setting up a cluster with SnapMirror would probably be more expensive, but not prohibitively so.
A loaded E420R tape server with local disk storage comes out to around $75000. An F760 with a terabyte of disk and enough SnapMirror licenses for all the filers adds up to around $450K. Maybe I'm missing something... I'm assuming I need to buy a SnapMirror license for each of the dozen filers mirroring to the tape server filer.