I don't know about the pro's but the con's you cite are not accurate in most cases.

1) pretty much the case

2) how do you figure? They use CIFS and NFS just like every other network client. They just happen to be the only client to your servers and the only server to you clients if you go all the way with them. But you don't have to go all the way if you choose not to. You can have just certain file systems under Acopia control.

3) They have owned up to a .5% latency insertion which, given their architecture, I can believe. We'll be looking to verify that claim in our testing.

4) Not hardly, at least not in the NFS world. Since this becomes the mount point for all your clients there's no way someone who needed something like this would be able to tell all the clients "stop doing stuff while I remount all the hosts". This is a put-in-place-and-leave-it-forever appliance.

5) Again, how do you figure? This appliance allows you to mount multiple NFS or CIFS shares from existing servers, aggregate them together into a single view, all the while increasing performance by turning the backend into a storage grid. Are you sure you're talking about Acopia?

6) No idea about that one, but I would use NetApp as the backend of this appliance for certain.

The basic idea, given a compute farm and NAS shop (NetApp specifically in this case), is to have the Acopia import however many qtrees you see fit to make up a single file system for the world. Then have it present all of those qtrees as a single file system and mount point. Depending on your policies you can have file writes round robin or do latency based file placement. This is the basic concept of a storage grid, spreading storage IO across multiple systems while still presenting a coherent file system and view. Other people accomplish the same idea in different ways (Ibix, Panasas, Isilon, Lustre, etc..). Acopia is unique in that it puts that capability in the network (switch) rather than in a server appliance or software. I'm not saying that's better, just unique.

There are other functions the Acopia can do besides the storage grid but everyone has their own requirements and goals.

As to VFM for global namespace, fine if you are a CIFS only shop. They're NFS support is sorely lacking and basically a hack of automounter. They have other functions also, like data replication and site failover, but if you're a mixed environment don't bet on them just yet.

~JK

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From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Jonathan Cragle Sent: Wednesday, May 18, 2005 9:22 PM To: Venkat Appineni; toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Re: Experience with Acopia

Pros:

1. Their CEO is fairly well known in the industry.

2. Microsoft Gold Partner

3. Won an award from Leading Lights (same publishing group that publishes Byte and Switch)

Cons:

1. Expensive: The ARX1000 lists for $45,000; the ARX6000 lists for $150,000. You'll need two of them to provide redundancy, so you'll need to double both of these prices.

2. Proprietary file system

3. In-band solution: depends on who you ask, but this can directly impact your network utilization (Of course, Acopia will cite a report they paid to have done by ESG (Steve Duplessie group) that states "no impact on network, etc. There aren't enough installations (last I heard they had less than 15 actual customers).

4. Used mostly for file migration and then the appliance is ripped out and moved to the next location for migration of files. I'm not aware of anyone using it for global namespace purposes.

5. Can't leverage the current computer resources one already has, rather you're paying extra for the hardware. You also can't upgrade the hardware as you see fit, rather you'd need to upgrade to a different switch.

6. Partners with NetApp, but not OEM'd by them.

Have you already evaluated using VFM software to do this?

1. It's more cost-effective than Acopia

2. Sold and supported by NetApp

3. Provides support for NetApp and Microsoft snapshots and more.

4. Software suite of applications that provide policy-based global namespace, migration, archiving, DR, namespace backup/restore, data classfication & reporting.

5. Award-winning (has won three major industry awards in the past couple of months)

6. Out-of-band solution that won't impact the network

7. Standards-based

8. You can actually try it before you buy it versus going through a huge "selection" process to get an Acopia switch in-house to test in your environment. Download is available.

----- Original Message -----

From: Venkat Appineni mailto:appinenv@yahoo-inc.com

To: toasters@mathworks.com

Sent: Wednesday, May 18, 2005 4:44 PM

Subject: Experience with Acopia

We are planning to use Acopia networks ARX switches to provide global name space to bunch of filers. Has anyone used them before ? Any pros and cons ?

-Venkat