On 08/09/99 20:07:17 you wrote:

I'm interested in hearing any stories on how Netapps wins or loses your business. I'm currently shopping for storage and a Netapps filer seems to fit the bill. I've talked to other storage system vendors -- that big one, EMC (or is it Data General), MTI, and some others.

In my opinion, Netapp wins business by example, not by words. Anyone can talk down a product, but all you have to do is test drive a Netapp filer and test drive an EMC solution and see which works better for you for the price.

They all emphasize that:

• SAN is the future of storage

NAS is also the future of storage. The two are not incompatible. However, traditional SAN relies on traditional general-purposes UNIX and NT servers as front-ends, and that is clearly *not* the future.

• Netapps and NFS is a lock in to old technology

Gee, what do they propose to replace NFS with on the UNIX side? Do they expect you to go all NT? NT is old technology too.

But even so, Netapp also does CIFS, so I can't see how NFS is holding them back. What else is old technology? The fibre channel disks? The alpha CPU? The gigabit ethernet cards?

• Netapps is JBOD

That's silly. JBOD is the antithesis of RAID. And Netapp is clearly more than just disks.

• that Eurologic is an unknown scrap vendor

Before Eurologic they used Digital. Did they call Digital an unknown scrap vendor too?

• Netapps are impossible to back up

Hardly. People have been backing them up for years. Now, they can be *difficult* to back up the way you like, depending on your configuration, but Netapp is making great strides in improving this. I'd take the performance of a Netapp with the tradeoff of a little more work backing it up any day.

• RAID 4 is unreliable

RAID 4 is just as reliable as RAID 5, with easier expansion and less of a performance penalty (when used with WAFL).

• WAFL is slow

This is an odd complaint. How does one accurately test a filesystem's underlying performance without being skewed by the performance of the hardware it runs on? Still, if one can, the performance numbers that Netapp repeatedly puts up on SFS benchmarks seems to indiate that Netapp is able to do more with less. Perhaps their filesystem is slowing them down, but their software is just that much better than everyone elses?

• WAFL is impossible to recover when it becomes corrupt

Not true. I've always been able to recover filers in the rare case they became corrupt. There are few exceptions; I'm sure Netapp could give you actual reliability numbers under NDA.

• wack takes all day to report that you're still in trouble

So does fsck if you do it on a big filesystem. I'm not sure I understand this complaint. If you have reasonable sized filesystems wack can often fix any problems in them in a reasonable amount of time.

• the cluster failover takes too long
• the cluster failover is unreliable at best

I can't really judge this, but it would seem competitive with other industry solutions from the documentation.

• the Netapps performance is terribly slow

Uhhh, then why do they continually outperform all other competition on SFS benchmarks on response time, and provide more NFS ops per dollar or per hardware than other results? If the other vendors have a faster solution, they should post the results. They haven't... there are some *bigger* boxes that will give you more raw throughput, but cost more and use far more disk. You could put two filers in place of that one and get better performance at a lower price.

• the software is big pile of patches that are impossible to keep track of

Again, I don't understand the complaint. The same could be said for any piece of software. That doesn't mean it's true.

I would agree that patches from, say, Sun, are easier to keep track of, because they come out infrequently and sometimes never at all. You often have to wait until the next big release to hope that your bug is fixed. Netapp, on the other hand, will usually turn around a patch release to fix whatever specific bug you find in a few days, if it's critical. So sometimes there are patches out there that you might not know about, but you can easily keep up to date on the latest tested release on now.netapp.com. You don't want to be risking an untested patch release unless you need it for a particular problem you're having, do you?

They've also given me references of companies that have switched from Netapps to other solutions.

And Netapp can give you references of comapnies that have switch to Netapps from other solutions. Why don't you call them?

In general three themes came from the references:

• they lost data with Netapps. Why? Because they could not take a backup with their enterprise backup software and then they suffered a multiple disk failure from a set of disks with problem firmware.

That sounds like a customer problem, not a Netapp one. They didn't get the proper enterprise backup software when they got their Netapps, and were too dumb to implement a different backup solution in the meantime. "I didn't do backups because it didn't work with this *one* piece of software"? What kind of excuse is that? I'll have to try that out on my manager next time and see what he says.

As to the problem firmware, sounds like they should have upgraded it. None of this is any different from any other NAS/SAN solution. There are always risks with buggy code; that's what backups are for.

I've seen a lot of griping on this least lately about backups. How much of a problem is the backup situation and does the situation become a problem when it requires a patch for the Netapps software that may introduce other instabilities?

I'd say the problem is mild if you use supported software. The pool of supported software is growing every day. Regular backup and retore have been pretty stable for some time now.

• the Netapps filer was too slow for database use. I could understand how some of the storage arrays directly attached to a server could be faster. This isn't my application space, so I'm not outright concerned with it.

It's also wrong. Netapp is often faster than directly attached storage arrays, so long as you have a good network setup. Ask Netapp how they implement their databases in-house.

But, I have seen some of the recent messages on performance and throughput. How would you rate the Netapps for performance for things like home directory storage?

3-10 times better than anything else for the same price. Maybe twice as fast as anything else at a higher price.

• the clustering did not work. Paid for cluster and the failover did not work as advertised.

  This concerns me, because I am willing to pay the extra money for a cluster. As long as I'm shelling out, should I go to EMC for reliability or hope that the Netapps failover can work? I can get more Netapps for the money.

I think Netapp's advatanges are worth it even if the failover doesn't work, unless you absolutely need 100% failover in your particular environment. If so, then I can't say if EMC is better or not, having not the experience with their failover. However, it may not matter, since their performance will be so bad at that price point no one will care about failover.

I'm not dumb enough to believe all of the claims that sales droids make. But, I'd like to hear some opinions as to what makes you buy Netapps, what keeps you on Netapps, and what will drive you away from Netapps.

Netapps are faster, simpler, and more reliable than any other competitor's solution for the same price. Period. They do require some tinkering and patching from time to time, if you are in a particularly demanding environment. And they do have to be backed up if you want 100% security against a rare double disk failure.

Bruce