Peter> On Thu, Feb 02, 2006 at 08:59:12AM -0500, John Stoffel wrote:
> "Peter" == Peter D Gray pdg@uow.edu.au writes:
Peter> With netapp, I get WAFL file system technology, for a SUN and Peter> SAN, I get UFS (maybe ZFS) technology.
Don't forget VxFS, a very nice and manageable filesystem. Put it with VxVM and you've got alot of the OnTap 7 aggregate/flexvol stuff already there for you.
Peter> Not standard in solaris, as far as I am aware. Peter> (correct me if I am wrong).
Nope, it's not standard. It's an add on product.
Peter> And you get some of the features of WAFL, but not others. And Peter> the ones you do get are implemented entirely differently, which Peter> has some impacts such as performance.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. As far as I can tell, VxFS on top of VxVM had *more* features in terms of sizing and such than did OnTap < 7G. It wasn't until we got FlexVols that you could actually shrink volumes, which VxVM and VxFS together could always do.
But I was admit they are targetting different audiences in some ways.
Peter> It appears from first glance that ZFS has nearly all the Peter> features of WAFL, at least conceptually if not in practice. Peter> Are they using netapp patents I wonder?
I dbout it...
Peter> As others have said, you cannot criticize an OS when you are on Peter> a very early release that was superceded months ago.
I can always criticize a release... even if I'm on an early release. The bug we hit was in regards to quotas and qtrees, something which OnTap has had for years. Basically, if you did:
qtree create qtree resize qtree delete qtree create
you could crash the filer and have it endlessly reboot, turn on quotas, crash, dump core, boot... not fun.
Peter> We have been on 7G now for months on all our filers without any Peter> issue at all. I will say that 7g when it was released was not Peter> as stable as 6, but thats hardly surprising given the magitude Peter> of the changes.
Sure, and I'm sure it will get better and better and better as time goes on. As I said elsewhere, we went with 7G because we were doing a full NetApp refresh last year and we wanted the FlexVols. Running into bugs was expected, just a bit disappointing at times.
But I still like and trust NetApps. Don't get me wrong.
John