My guess would be "Get approved by penny-pinching management".
I know I've had many times where I've had to fight for keeping/upgrading a netapp over objections such as "Well, I could just buy a bunch of cheap disks and a server at Fry's to do the same thing!"
Things like those stupid SNAP Servers don't help either. We had to move a bunch of stuff to one of those a while back over my objections. Fast forward a couple months and the SNAP Server loses a disk, which somehow causes it to actually crash and corrupt most of the data (which wasn't all being backed up yet because we were still fighting with a weird permission problem trying to get NFS backups to work.) Bear in mind the ancient F230 that we moved data *from* has never experienced any data loss like that, and is in fact still running.
Now when people talk about putting something on the SNAP server I just say "Yeah, good luck with that" and I keep putting my stuff on my good friend Mr F940.
On Fri, Aug 26, 2005 at 08:05:11AM -0700, Sphar, Mike wrote:
My guess would be "Get approved by penny-pinching management".
I know I've had many times where I've had to fight for keeping/upgrading a netapp over objections such as "Well, I could just buy a bunch of cheap disks and a server at Fry's to do the same thing!"
Things like those stupid SNAP Servers don't help either. We had to move a bunch of stuff to one of those a while back over my objections. Fast forward a couple months and the SNAP Server loses a disk, which somehow causes it to actually crash and corrupt most of the data (which wasn't all being backed up yet because we were still fighting with a weird permission problem trying to get NFS backups to work.) Bear in mind the ancient F230 that we moved data *from* has never experienced any data loss like that, and is in fact still running.
Now when people talk about putting something on the SNAP server I just say "Yeah, good luck with that" and I keep putting my stuff on my good friend Mr F940.
Previous gig we had one of those SNAP servers. The other sysadmin kept refering to it as a netapp, every time I did, I'd throw something at him. He just didn't understand. His new gig, he's got some real NetApps, he's since appologized for ever mis-using that as a generic term.
I have to chime in here too... I was in a job interview about 2 weeks ago. The site was a large University doing Military research. Lots of number crunching and large datafiles. They were putting together compute clusters and disk arrays of piecemeal parts from the lowest bidders. The person interviewing me told me "I don't have time for the hardware, I'm doing other stuff and have to do the hardware because there is nobody else, I don't want to sit down with those big complicated manuals and read all that stuff".
Quietly I cringed at the thought of this person setting this stuff up without reading the manuals! I asked if they'd taken a look at NetApp and they said "yeah we looked at them, but perhaps not well enough" and we moved on. But they repeatedly complained about how they are needing a Terabyte every few months. I salivated at the opportunity which unfortunately didn't pan out. (puny salary)
And yes I passed the lead onto my NetApp sales guy... :-)
There's definitely a market on the low end if NetApp wants to be like McDonalds and sell billions and billions....
-Robert
Michael Parson wrote:
On Fri, Aug 26, 2005 at 08:05:11AM -0700, Sphar, Mike wrote:
My guess would be "Get approved by penny-pinching management".
I know I've had many times where I've had to fight for keeping/upgrading a netapp over objections such as "Well, I could just buy a bunch of cheap disks and a server at Fry's to do the same thing!"
Things like those stupid SNAP Servers don't help either. We had to move a bunch of stuff to one of those a while back over my objections. Fast forward a couple months and the SNAP Server loses a disk, which somehow causes it to actually crash and corrupt most of the data (which wasn't all being backed up yet because we were still fighting with a weird permission problem trying to get NFS backups to work.) Bear in mind the ancient F230 that we moved data *from* has never experienced any data loss like that, and is in fact still running.
Now when people talk about putting something on the SNAP server I just say "Yeah, good luck with that" and I keep putting my stuff on my good friend Mr F940.
Previous gig we had one of those SNAP servers. The other sysadmin kept refering to it as a netapp, every time I did, I'd throw something at him. He just didn't understand. His new gig, he's got some real NetApps, he's since appologized for ever mis-using that as a generic term.
Im in the same boat, I lost a Fas250 cookoff to a Dell/EMC-100 POS because management couldn't understand the software features, the only thing that mattered was the hardware, and Dell gave us the box for cost, and a bunch of free LCD monitors.
*grr*
Only now are people wondering where the snapshots went, and in an engineering house, it wont get any better. Cant wait for a disk failure.
On 8/26/05 8:05 AM, "Sphar, Mike" Mike_Sphar@bmc.com wrote:
My guess would be "Get approved by penny-pinching management".
I know I've had many times where I've had to fight for keeping/upgrading a netapp over objections such as "Well, I could just buy a bunch of cheap disks and a server at Fry's to do the same thing!"
Things like those stupid SNAP Servers don't help either. We had to move a bunch of stuff to one of those a while back over my objections. Fast forward a couple months and the SNAP Server loses a disk, which somehow causes it to actually crash and corrupt most of the data (which wasn't all being backed up yet because we were still fighting with a weird permission problem trying to get NFS backups to work.) Bear in mind the ancient F230 that we moved data *from* has never experienced any data loss like that, and is in fact still running.
Now when people talk about putting something on the SNAP server I just say "Yeah, good luck with that" and I keep putting my stuff on my good friend Mr F940.
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Jeff Mohler -
Michael Parson -
Robert Borowicz -
Sphar, Mike