On 05/25/99 15:22:26 you wrote:

In message Pine.BSF.4.10.9905241404040.332-100000@schizo.cdsnet.net, Jaye Mathisen writes:

...

I just got done catching my breath, and wiping the tears out of my eyes reviewing the latest storage quote from Netapp for my 540.

Out of curiosity, was it simply a quote on more disks, which was too high for you, or is your current system already at capacity and you'd have to do a bunch of upgrades to newer hardware to get more storage?

If it's the latter it's really unfair to use it for price comparison when other products; you will run into similar limitations on them eventually.

If it's the former, remember that the disk is more expensive because it goes hand-in-had with the high performance and testing. If you want to use another product with cheaper disk, it's not going to be as reliable, particularly under heavy loads.

...

Is anybody using some of the other boxes available as adjuncts to the netapp? I'm going to keep my netapps for some very specific users, but I believe I can move significant amounts of data (log files, etc). off to other products, and avoid paying absolutely ridiculous prices...

Well, it's not clear what you want these adjunct products to do. If you care about reliability or performance, you'd get a netapp despite the price. If you don't care about these things, and simply want cheap bulk storage for "significant amounts of data" that you don't care how slow it is, or if it crashes and you lose all your data, nor how much administration time it will take adding new disks since you won't get RAID-4, then I see no reason to go with another "appliance-like" product. Just add some disks to your regular user/compute/development/cpu/whatever-you-call-them servers, be they Sun, Linux, Compaq/Digital, or whatever.

Bruce