+----- On Wed, 11 Aug 1999 07:48:28 CDT, Arvind K Aggarwal writes: | Maybe our Auspex sales people don't know what is going on with CIFS. | They have constantly pointed us to using SAMBA because of their | inability to support CIFS. Overall Auspex is HIGHLY unreliable as | compared to Network Appliances. At least that is OUR experience here.

I've worked with Auspices for over 5 years now and some of the machines that we have here are even older than that. My toaster experience is much less, about 18 months.

I find that Auspices are extremely reliable if you leave them alone, part of that is due to some of the OS releases that come out of Auspex, particularly the odd releases for some unknown reason. We have only rarely had any hardware problems with them and I don't recall that we ever had a big outage as a result.

We haven't had many OS problems with our toasters with the exception that they seem just out of the ark in some respects (e.g. ntp). There have been some hardware problems though, one particular example was a faulty qfe card, the system refused to boot and gave a cryptic error message that neither I and our netapp representative understood. The qfe card turned out to be the only one that wasn't on site but even without that the down time was too long. I feel that netapp feels that they don't have too worry about rebooting because they do it so well, Auspex takes a lot longer so they have to be more careful.

Taking everything into account, I feel happier with Auspex than we netapp. As a sysadmin I feel even better with having Sun's but I can't satisfy all of our requirements that way. We bought Dell toasters because they satisfied our user's perceived needs and have to accept that it'll take more work on our part to keep things working.

/Michael