*provided i needed RAID5*, that's a no-brainer. it's noticeably better than any of the other RAID5 offerings i've tried, and likely cheaper than
DEC makes a screamingly fast RAID 5 box...
RAID0+1 with anyone's discs and arrays. administration interface, snapshots, ease of dumping and nice blue faceplate (just kidding) are all factors for me, too.
Service is also an important factor, which NetApp is +very+ adept at.
David, if you buy F330s, though, make sure they send you BLUE NettApp tee-shirts. We bought a pair of F330s last fall and are still waiting for ours. Maybe their sales department needs to take lessons from their support department... ho hum!
-Caroline
On Fri, 28 Mar 1997, Caroline Brossi Yates wrote:
Service is also an important factor, which NetApp is +very+ adept at.
I second that. NetApp support is great! Regarding whether or not one should buy a NetApp filer I would say it depends very much on what you want to do with it. I'm going to use ours for news and I think it will be very good for that purpose. I've heard people were satisfied using NetApp's for mail, www, and user directories as well. Of course, a NetApp isn't the same thing as a 'RAID system' - a NetApp is an NFS server utilizing RAID technology. If you go and buy an external RAID unit you would still have to hook it up to some kind of computer to make it an NFS server (if that's what you need). If you only want a fast disk subsystem for some machine you should probably buy one of those external RAID towers or something. Clariion and Eurologic makes decent ones, I think (I am using a small Eurologic Voyager 3000 unit which has worked great so far).
David, if you buy F330s, though, make sure they send you BLUE NettApp tee-shirts. We bought a pair of F330s last fall and are still waiting for ours. Maybe their sales department needs to take lessons from their support department... ho hum!
Hey, we bought an F540 and didn't haggle too much about the price either but we never got any T-shirts!! Is there no justice in the world at all??
/Ragnar, Algonet
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Caroline Brossi Yates -
Ragnar Lonn