The IP4700 is not that far out of the F85 league in anything other than price. The only advantage that the IP4700 offers over the F85 is redundancy in the hardware. Most department level systems do not require this kind of redundancy. As far as performance, features and manageability go the NetApp box as well as many other NAS boxes on the market kill the EMC box.

The issues with the EMC box stem from the fact that they bought CrosStor Software. This NAS Software was specifically designed as an OEM software to be sold to as many different vendors as possible. A few of the vendors with licenses on the software include Connex (out of business), MTI (soon to be out of business), and IBM (choose not to release a NAS product with this software). Since the software was designed to be an OEM product there were allowances for it to run on most of the processors available. This included Alpha processors, a la the NetApp 700 series, Intel processors, etc. The drawback to this is that it has very high software overhead for a NAS product. This slows the performance waaaayyyyy down. I have seen numbers below those quoted for the F85, let alone the 760 or 800 series. The software was also not fully developed yet. The company had started with the difficult parts, for example clustering, but had not yet finished the management portion or the file sharing between CIFS and NFS.

I am sure that EMC will sell a few of these boxes. I am even more sure that EMC will get the problem fixed eventually and have a serious competitor in the market. As of right now though most people that have looked at the product move on to something else unless they really want EMC at all costs. Regards, Mike

Tom "Mad Dog" Yergeau wrote:

The F85 and the IP4700 are NOT in the same class of equipment. F85 is for a small office, IP4700 is for a decent sized department (couple hundred users).

If the F85 is what you need, the IP4700 is a total overkill. If the IP4700 is in the class you need, you should be looking at an F740 or F760 cluster, not an F85.

MD

-----Original Message----- From: Barry Lustig [mailto:barry@lustig.com] Sent: Monday, April 30, 2001 1:44 PM To: Toasters Subject: F85

Has anybody had any experience with the F85? I'm most interested in the hardware. As a continuation of my last message, EMC is pushing hard with an IP4700 against an F85. They've been touting the reliability of their box and that it has no single point of failure (2 processors, etc). I'd like to know if anyone on the list has deployed the F85 and can give a reference on them. Also, does anyone know what type of failover the IP4700 is actually providing between their 2 storage processors. It doesn't look at first glance that the surviving processor takes over the MAC address of the dead processor. It just starts arping for the IP address of its partner.

barry