Jeffrey Skelton jss@NET2PHONE.COM writes:

• SAN is the future of storage

Yes, but we are in the dark ages right now. Not all vendors support switched fibre channel, a must for any SAN to work as advertised. The lack of multiple vendors for fibre channel switches also makes for a hard sell right now.

Some vendors are further ahead than others in this front. Compaq seems to have a nice, cohesive product. Their new HS{G,Z}80 raid array is slick.

• Netapps and NFS is a lock in to old technology

Electricity is a lock in to an old technology. NFS and SMB(CIFS) are the way to share data on a network. Do you think all your clients will be part of the SAN? No way. The SAN is a method for large systems to have shared access to devices. NOTE: this does not mean shared access to the *data*. You need more smarts than SAN for that. Something like clustering would get it...

The fact is that even when you have a SAN deployed, you will still need a common access method for the clients to hit the data. NFS/HTTP/CIFS or whatever your protocol du jour is.

• Netapps is JBOD

Not quite. JBOD is a simplification. WAFL rocks and is what really lets the filers shine.

• that Eurologic is an unknown scrap vendor

Vendor FUD.

• Netapps are impossible to back up

Not really: vol copy works well. Sure, you cannot run Legato on the filer, so it makes backups more challenging, but NDMP is supposed to help. The JVM in the filer might prove to be useful in this area.

• RAID 4 is unreliable

As compared with? Sure, it is not the same as hardware RAID 1+0, but it is also 1/2 the price (as far as number of disks required, etc).

• WAFL is slow

Compared with? No way. UFS is a dog. AdvFS is a black box. Veritas is Sun only. XFS is not ported to other platforms (yet). WAFL is the way to get performance on these boxes. The white paper should shed some light on this.

Seriously: the main drawback to any competing solution is the file system. Show me something else that has the ability to do snapshots, grow the filesystem on the fly, increase the ammount of files on the fly, do well with large directories and still be able to pump data out quickly.

• WAFL is impossible to recover when it becomes corrupt

Given sufficient corruption, any filesystem is unrecoverable. I have seen some seriously bad situations and come out ok.

• wack takes all day to report that you're still in trouble

Tough one. THis is true sometimes. If you do not run the right incantation of wack (version, etc), you could be faced with never-ending wacks. This is a pain.

• the cluster failover takes too long

What do you call too long?

• the cluster failover is unreliable at best

I cannot address this, as I have not used it in production.

• the Netapps performance is terribly slow

Again, compared to what? Check the SPEC SFS numbers (what used to be LADDIS) at http://www.spec.org/ and see what the vendor numbers are. Sure, the f760 solution falls short of the 49k NFSops that an EMC Celera does, but it is also a small fraction of the price.

Yes, you can hit a performance wall with the filers. My face has a brick wall imprint on it :(

• the software is big pile of patches that are impossible to keep track of

No. But NetApp could do better at alerting customers of bugs (especially evil bugs). If you do autosupport, the NetApp folks should be able to do some analysis of the data and make reccomendations (based on firmware revs, OS version, etc).

They've also given me references of companies that have switched from Netapps to other solutions.

I am sure there are plenty of companies that have done this. But this is more vendor FUD.

The NetApp filers are great tools, but they are not a one-size-fits-all solution. Different needs call for different solutions, so sometimes people outgrow the filers (or the filers were never the right solution for the person to begin with).

• they lost data with Netapps. Why? Because they could not take a backup with their enterprise backup software and then they suffered a multiple disk failure from a set of disks with problem firmware.

This is more a problem of laziness. In my previous job, we backed up our filers with Alexandria. It worked well. It was not as fast as doing a raw dump to tape, but it worked.

• the Netapps filer was too slow for database use. I could

Perhaps.

and throughput. How would you rate the Netapps for performance for things like home directory storage?

They would excel at this. The filers do very well in a high read to low write ratio environment.

• the clustering did not work. Paid for cluster and the failover did not work as advertised.

Some folks have misconceptions about what the cluster failover does. I think this is mainly NetApp's fault for not really being clear about what the product does (or setting proper expectations). Important details of the filer operation are buried in different locations.

Clustering is not a simple thing to deploy. It may appear trivial, but it adds a layer of complexity which may not make all people comfortable. You need to make sure that the added reliability is worth the cost (not just money).

I'm not dumb enough to believe all of the claims that sales droids make. But, I'd like to hear some opinions as to what makes you buy Netapps, what keeps you on Netapps, and what will drive you away from Netapps.

I have used filers for close to 5 years now. The core competency of the company is the WAFL file system and the NFS code. These boxes are good at delivering data.

Alex