I'm liking the thread that John Stewart started about his filer replacement, so I decided to start my own.
We too are faced with replacing our NetApp filers this year. We have and F720 (cifs file shares) and an F810 (cifs and iscsi). Both of these filers are maxed out both in disk space and processor. We had NetApp come up with a solution for us to replace these and the proposal is attractive. They put together a 3020 system for us that should meet both of our storage and processing needs for at least the next 2 years. So we budgeted for the replacement. Then the unthinkable happened...
My boss received a postcard from a company called Pillar Data. He brought the postcard to me and said, "we should look at what these guys have." The rest is history. For those of you not familiar with Pillar Data, it's a startup of Larry Ellison's (the ORACLE Larry Ellison.) They have a really neat product, and their QOS is quite impressive. But I don't think that their product is mature enough yet for prime time. After spending some time with their engineers and traveling to the Enterprise Technology Center in Atlanta to demo one of these solutions, I found some chinks in their armor. I won't go into the details here, but if anyone wants to know what I've learned about them, I'll be happy to share that information.
So this leads me to my question. Has anyone heard of Pillar Data and if so I was wondering if you shared my opinion (or not) of their product? I want to stick with the NetApp solution that was proposed, so I'm looking for ammunition to back up my argument.
Cheers.
Luther L. Allin IV, MCSE, ICSA Network Systems Engineer Miller & Martin PLLC http://www.millermartin.com/ 832 Georgia Avenue, Suite 1000 Chattanooga, TN 37402 lallin@millermartin.com (423) 785-8381 (Direct) (423) 321-1678 (Fax) Atlanta-Chattanooga-Nashville - CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE -
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Ask Oracle what storage they use internally: NetApp or Pillar?
then decide.
-skottie
Luther Allin wrote:
I'm liking the thread that John Stewart started about his filer replacement, so I decided to start my own.
We too are faced with replacing our NetApp filers this year. We have and F720 (cifs file shares) and an F810 (cifs and iscsi). Both of these filers are maxed out both in disk space and processor. We had NetApp come up with a solution for us to replace these and the proposal is attractive. They put together a 3020 system for us that should meet both of our storage and processing needs for at least the next 2 years. So we budgeted for the replacement. Then the unthinkable happened...
My boss received a postcard from a company called Pillar Data. He brought the postcard to me and said, "we should look at what these guys have." The rest is history. For those of you not familiar with Pillar Data, it's a startup of Larry Ellison's (the ORACLE Larry Ellison.) They have a really neat product, and their QOS is quite impressive. But I don't think that their product is mature enough yet for prime time. After spending some time with their engineers and traveling to the Enterprise Technology Center in Atlanta to demo one of these solutions, I found some chinks in their armor. I won't go into the details here, but if anyone wants to know what I've learned about them, I'll be happy to share that information.
So this leads me to my question. Has anyone heard of Pillar Data and if so I was wondering if you shared my opinion (or not) of their product? I want to stick with the NetApp solution that was proposed, so I'm looking for ammunition to back up my argument.
Cheers.
Luther L. Allin IV, MCSE, ICSA Network Systems Engineer Miller & Martin PLLC http://www.millermartin.com/832 Georgia Avenue, Suite 1000 Chattanooga, TN 37402 lallin@millermartin.com mailto:lallin@millermartin.com (423) 785-8381 (Direct) (423) 321-1678 (Fax) Atlanta-Chattanooga-Nashville
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I'm liking the thread that John Stewart started about his filer replacement, so I decided to start my own. We too are faced with replacing our NetApp filers this year. We have and F720 (cifs file shares) and an F810 (cifs and iscsi). Both of these filers are maxed out both in disk space and processor. We had NetApp come up with a solution for us to replace these and the proposal is attractive. They put together a 3020 system for us that should meet both of our storage and processing needs for at least the next 2 years. So we budgeted for the replacement. Then the
Don't look at just the prices as the cost comparison.. because you aren't seeing all the costs associated with each solution. Think of it more as a reliable reputation vs innovative springboard type approach. Can your company afford possible downtimes? support that doesn't match up to NetApp? no resources like now.netapp.com docs? Recently went to a presentation that talked about Google implementing on the frontier stuff.. because they are willing to invest the time of their software engineers to write software that deals with reliability problems. NetApp isn't the only one in the market.. so the prices they set aren't arbitrary. When you look at the overall cost.. it's including a lot of the niceties that other new companies won't have.
My company Decru was recently bought by NetApp.. but I've always liked NetApp filers. Even though we are part of NetApp, we are actually partners with a lot of the storage vendors out there as our product needs to interoperate with them. The support, and technical knowhow that NetApp shared even in my early days at Caltech was excellent. If a disk was about to fail, they knew about it with autosupport and had the disk on its way before I even realized that there was a possible problem.
There are plenty of great solutions out in the market. Look carefully at the resources you have available to you.. the experience you have, and what time you have available for training on a new platform. Think about possible upgrade paths (check out their roadmap for the future).
Jennifer
On Jan 31, 2006, at 6:10 AM, Luther Allin wrote:
I'm liking the thread that John Stewart started about his filer replacement, so I decided to start my own. We too are faced with replacing our NetApp filers this year. We have and F720 (cifs file shares) and an F810 (cifs and iscsi). Both of these filers are maxed out both in disk space and processor. We had NetApp come up with a solution for us to replace these and the proposal is attractive. They put together a 3020 system for us that should meet both of our storage and processing needs for at least the next 2 years. So we budgeted for the replacement. Then the unthinkable happened... My boss received a postcard from a company called Pillar Data. He brought the postcard to me and said, "we should look at what these guys have." The rest is history. For those of you not familiar with Pillar Data, it's a startup of Larry Ellison's (the ORACLE Larry Ellison.) They have a really neat product, and their QOS is quite impressive. But I don't think that their product is mature enough yet for prime time. After spending some time with their engineers and traveling to the Enterprise Technology Center in Atlanta to demo one of these solutions, I found some chinks in their armor. I won't go into the details here, but if anyone wants to know what I've learned about them, I'll be happy to share that information. So this leads me to my question. Has anyone heard of Pillar Data and if so I was wondering if you shared my opinion (or not) of their product? I want to stick with the NetApp solution that was proposed, so I'm looking for ammunition to back up my argument.
Hi Luther,
Pillar has an interesting concept of essentially utilizing low cost disk (SATA, ATA) to handle "enterprise" work load, hence their emphasis on QoS. It's a great idea, Netapp and other Established players however are not slackers and will probably erase or mitigate any technological advantage that pillar would offer. That means they're going to have to compete on things like support.
Pillar is probably going to be a decent competitor for Netapp in the future for things like disk arrays, but at this point they probably won't offer anything in terms of cost advantage that Netapp couldn't easily beat. Their sales reps would probably admit this as well.
Regards, Max
Cheers. Luther L. Allin IV, MCSE, ICSA Network Systems Engineer Miller & Martin PLLC 832 Georgia Avenue, Suite 1000 Chattanooga, TN 37402 lallin@millermartin.com (423) 785-8381 (Direct) (423) 321-1678 (Fax) Atlanta-Chattanooga-Nashville
- CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE -
The information contained in this e-mail message is legally privileged and confidential, and is intended only for the use of the addressee. If you are not the intended recipient, please be aware that any dissemination, distribution or copy of this e-mail is prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please immediately notify us by reply e-mail and delete this message and any attachments. Thank you.
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Jennifer Davis -
Luther Allin -
Max -
Skottie Miller