On Thu, 20 Jul 2000, Eyal Traitel wrote:
- Proven stability of filesystem - NetApp's WAFL has real-life proven
stability, which is consistent thru shutdown and powerdowns - even though ext3 is using journaling, WAFL's Consistency Points using the NVRAM should cover stability much better (and faster).
I understand that. I'm just getting back what I hear from VA Linux developers. Ext3 does full-data journaling, but NVRAM is still much, much faster.
My main problem is that a lot of people like the F740/760, but the F720 only has 1/4th the NVRAM. If I could afford a F740, I'd say F740 for sure. But since I can only get a F720 (and have to argue for one), the Linux option still comes up from a cost perspective.
- Crash recovery - filer's fsck (wack) is much much faster than
other vendors' solutions - ~600GB/hr and more.
Yes, the filer doesn't have to do a fsck because of the NVRAM. I find that Linux Ext2 (with large block sizes) actually does a real, full fsck faster than many other filesystems (especially versus NTFS -- ouch!). But without meta-data journaling, Linux takes forever when you "just want to get the system back up."
- Ease of use - adding capacity is that easy - no extra config.
The Mylex eXtremeRAIDs are very nice, and can resize the volumes on the fly. But resizing Ext2/3 is a pain, I know, because it is a traditional filesystem with pre-laid Inodes. I like the NetApp way with Inode creation on the fly.
Also - you're wasting time on choosing the right CPU arch. and motherboard bus chipsets - leave that to NetApp's engineering experts, and you can save time (and money, and get anyway better performance).
Multiple PCI channel and memory on x86 is getting mighty cheap. In fact, some people have commented that the Alpha in the NetApp gets saturated with duties under high-load conditions.
- Extra NetApp-specific "bonus-features" - snapshot can lower your
restore needs dramatically, and can help for some recovery cases.
Yes, this is a huge bonus in the NetApp department.
- Enterprise-level features which you can leverage in the future
(which Linux doesn't have YET, not that I've seen, others - correct me if I'm wrong) - SnapMirror/SnapRestore, which complement the disaster-recovery issues.
For $5K I can get backup features that are similar, but not as intuitive as the NetApp I admit.
- Future growth - one filer can grow (now) to 1.4TB, which I
don't think many Linux storage solution go that high, and NetApp will upgrade to 3TB and higher for one filer very soon.
I can easily go that high with that Mylex controller (or multiple controllers). One thing I do like about the NetApp that most RAID controllers don't seem to have is RAID-4 support.
- Performance - CIFS performance should be much higher, NFS also much
higher.
I could care less about CIFS performance (which is 10% of my performance), NFS is what I care about.
- NFS/CIFS securuty - Linux can only share to PCs with Samba, which is
fine, but only a user-level application (slower that Data ONTAP's kernel level implementation),
Microsoft makes the same argument against Samba as well, of course Microsoft's CIFS crashes every couple weeks. As long as OnTap doesn't crash, then that's interesting to note.
and also the filesystem on Linux will still be Unix-based, and will not be able to maintain NT ACLs etc.
So I can assign multiple users/groups to a file in NetApp's CIFS support? Does it support all NT permissions? I can modify NT ACLs with Samba, but only for the user/group/other (Samba maps NT ACLs to UNIX equivalents).
I hope it sums it up somehow,
Yes, thanx for info on CIFS ACLs.
-- TheBS
-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith CONTACT INFO *********************************************************** Chat: thebs413 @ AOL/MSN/Yahoo (see http://Everybuddy.com) Email: mailto:thebs@theseus.com,b.j.smith@ieee.org Home: http://www.SmithConcepts.com