Can you please,sir, educate us all on how BlueARC has suceeded in making their disks spin faster than all of the other storage companies? Assuming most people can't afford 3 TBs of memory for their storage systems just how do they get around the mechanical latenices and rotational latencies of a rotating media device(which btw, is what WAFL is good at doing)?

I glanced at a couple of the PDF files on their web site today, and several things stuck me:

1. I'm not aware of any Gigabit Ethernet products that run half-duplex or anyone who'd go to the expense of plumbing for GbE just to run it that way. So saying that you get 2 gigabits of bandwidth over a single full-duplex Gigabit pipe is, well, kinda silly.

2. They seem to be doing some interesting stuff with hardware, granted; it looks like an interesting approach. I suspect that it will eventually lead them, however, to the same point that countless others before them in other segments of the computing industry have reached: the losing side of the constant back-and-forth between expensive custom hardware jumping out to a performance lead, only to have general purpose hardware and better software catch up. Graphics comes to mind as an obvious example; DSPs giving way to faster CPUs; microcoded vs. hardwired CPU architectures; SCSI vs. IDE; etc. etc. etc. For every example of someone who's done something really cool and ahead of their time with a unique custom hardware solution, you can find a counter example of the rest of the universe catching up as the lessons learned give way to advances in more flexible, general purpose hardware. It's a pendulum, and I'm not going to argue that one way is better, although I do have a fondness for weird old hardware that nobody remembers anymore... (Of course, nobody remembers it precisely because it was weird. :-)

3. No mention of pricing anywhere. No NFS numbers, from what I could gather. Not a lot of detail about the feature set, but they throw out the usual blizzard o' buzzwords.

But I just gave it the most cursory once-over. It looks like an interesting box. Of course, it also looks like it pretty much runs a fairly fixed configuration. You're outta luck if you run ATM or FDDI or anything besides Gigabit Ethernet. (Well, that's true anyway. :-)

Finally, I personally don't mind when the topic of competitors' products comes up on the toasters list, because it could be argued that this is a useful forum for discussing NAS issues in general.

What I find highly amusing is that most of the posts lately have had to deal with tape backups - which just plain sucks no matter WHAT platform you're on - and NT issues, which I must grudgingly pay attention to because it is an unavoidable fact of life in most IT shops these days. But in response to this BlueARC stuff, and the EMC stuff that comes up now and then, and the riveting discussion about marketing swag :-) what's really telling for me is that I haven't really got much to complain about. My filers just hum along, trouble free, for months on end. That's kinda the whole point, I think.

Just like Micro$oft touting "five nines" availability in all the trade rags for their OS that hasn't even been available to the public for a whole year [1], BlueARC is just getting out of the chute and so it'll take a while to prove or disprove their claims. In a tough market like this it often takes a good long while, as NetApp and any other company in this business certainly knows, to establish credibility. You can't pull a solid track record out of your hat, no matter how cool and wizzy your hardware may be. So in a year or so maybe they'll be a solid contender.

But I'm sure NetApp won't be sitting on their thumbs in the meantime. It looks like I will be, however. I feel like the Maytag repairman:

1:24am up 204 days, 18:18 1872583465 NFS ops, 0 CIFS ops, 0 HTTP ops 1:24am up 220 days, 23:41 1333651393 NFS ops, 169589199 CIFS ops, 0 HTTP ops

<knock>wood</knock> I just love typing "uptime". :-)

Cheers,

-- Chris

[1] So I can just hear it now, the voice of a bleary-eyed product manager somewhere in Redmond: "Hey! Build 31928 stayed up in the QA lab all night without a crash! So if we just extrapolate these numbers by a factor of 365... woohoo! Five nines! Call marketing! Ship it!"

-- Chris Lamb, Unix Guy MeasureCast, Inc. 503-241-1469 x247 skeezics@measurecast.com