We've done some consideration of other vendors including 3par and bluearc recently, but because our storage solutions need to be global, one of our firm requirements from a vendor is true global support, meaning not going through some third party in other regions, particularly India, and that seems to still rule out most of these newer players in the space for us still.

Coming from a very large social networking site myself, I'd have a hard time doing what I do without NetApp. I'm with Mark, and stick with what you know. One of the best things about Netapp is that you can just swap out heads for upgrades easy, and each new head has more capacity so add your new shelves to a new head, and keep your exisiting shelves. Saves you the trouble of data migration too.

If you are set on a forklift, Onstor isn't a bad way to go. I have a few, and they've been pretty easy to use, and adapt to (and I'm a big netapp fan). They've had their issues, but not horrible terrible ones. Just annoying. I hear the marriage of 3par and OnStor is fantastic, but I've not seen it with my own eyes (yet).

But by far, if I had to start over again with architecture, I'd lean on Isilon. They are a little pricey, but you get a lot of nice things. Very highly available, bolt on more performance, or capacity, and fantastic ease of use. We actually got Ganglia on the cluster nodes itself so it looks and feels just like a typical cluster to us. And it's been rock solid pushing more then 1.2 GB / sec (yes gigabytes per second). I've not compared it to GX, maybe I will in a few more revs of that product.

-Blake

On 4/4/07, Max Reid max.reid@saikonetworks.com wrote:

...

I recently toured two data-center's of a very large social networking site

MySpace? =)

(under NDA) and they are moving most their architecture away

...

from NetApp and toward 3par. They are however all FCP due to being a web facing shop who uses almost exclusive Windows, so once again it depends on the architecture.

The problem with the MySpace approach is that it is guaranteed to be far more expensive than a similar ONTAP setup (A multinode GX system.), not the kind of infrastructure model to adopt if you're looking to *cut* costs.

Regards, Max

Side note for the EMC NAS. Watch your lun size. EMC NDMP is a "special" re-written version of NDMP... We had issues with anything over 1.5TB spinning from tape.

Also in a DR situation you can only restore to the same "frame type"(cx600 can't restore to a cx700 etc) and the frames have to be running the same FLAIR code as the one the tapes were spun off of.

Please Re-evaluate these comments (they may have fixed things after our issues occurred)

-----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of David Vosburgh Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2007 6:13 AM To: letta@jlab.org Cc: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Re: If not NetApp, then who ?

Paul Letta wrote:

Hi Everyone,

We are a long time NetApp shop here. We started with the 540 and

have

upgraded multiple times and are now at FAS940's. The time has come

for

us to upgrade again.

We have been extremely happy with NetApp. The reliability, uptime, support, features, etc. have spoiled us for years.

What I want to ask the community now is: has anyone else appeared on

the

stage that you are as happy with ? There are a lot of products that claim to have snapshots, NFS/CIFS, etc. But how reliable are they ?

Has anyone that has been really happy with NetApps moved to any of the

newer players and been as happy ? My motivation looking elsewhere is,

of course, price. I admit, I have been slightly bitten by the cheap SATA file servers bug. Our current config is with all FC drives, but

if

you have enough disks, SATA seems to be close to the performance.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what NetApp's real competitors are ? Anyone have any stories to share with me about trying someone else (cheaper) ?

Thanks,

Paul Letta

We recently purchased a Clariion/Celerra filer to replace a bunch of older F760 filers. AFAIK, EMC was able to hit a price point that NetApp

would/could not. Not sure if anything else entered into the decision making process. Here are some observations (in no particular order) after the first six weeks:

1) the learning curve for the EMC filer is steeper than a NetApp: you really have to learn two pieces of hardware, the Clariion SAN and the Celerra NAS heads. They are in no way integrated together. 2) Celerra data movers are not active-active, so one of the expensive heads sits there doing nothing. 3) Clariion/Celerra is more complicated design: Clariion backend storage, two Celerra data movers, and a control station (two if you want

redundancy) to manage the data movers. 4) Celerra web interface is buggy: we've used a number of browsers, including the recommended IE6, to admin the Celerra and they all will periodically freeze. 5) occasional strange behavior on the Celerra: a) our first attempt at a

manual data mover failover resulted in a hung datamover and no failover;

b) luns presented to the Celerra sometimes to not appear after a rescan,

and have to be manually removed and rescanned from the CLI (which does seem reliable) 6) overly complex configuration: the Clariion/Celerra solution has loads

more configuration options than the NetApp, which means you have to learn about each of these to make intelligent decisions 7) we run lots of Oracle DB's, and occasionally we'll have a system go down suddenly. NFS locks don't get released and the DB won't start. On the NetApp you can release locks for a particular host, and you're good to go. On the Celerra, you have to unmount/mount the file system on the

data mover, affecting access to everyone using that filesystem. 8) resolution of cases with EMC has been very quick: I would say you get

to competent technical help faster than with NetApp.

As with most things in life, you get what you pay for.

Dave Vosburgh