Re: NetAps vs EMC

[Mike Loseke <mike@verinet.com>]

Thus spake Allen, Pat:
> I suppose I could be considered a long-time Network Appliance customer -
> I've been using them for the past 6 years! We started off with one of their
> old 1400 series boxes and have just upgraded and gone from there. Right now
> we have a F740 with around 450GB of disk storage and an older F330 with only
> 28GB of disk. By the end of this week we'll have another F740 delivered with
> an additional 252GB of disk that we'll cluster with the first one and two of
> Net App's NetCache boxes.

 We have eight filers with a few terabytes of total space on them.
Very very good product with an excellent support organization, both
post- and pre-sales.Our newer filers are using fibre-channel and it's
excellent.


> I can't comment on the reliability of EMC but it can't be any better than
> Net App! In the past 6 years I think I've had one disk go bad and some RAM
> became flakey. I found out about the RAM because the filer sent a
> notification message to the Net App support group. I received a phone call
> telling me that they were aware of a problem with my filer and that new RAM
> was on its way to me. How's that for support!!!! When you consider the lack
> of problems I've experienced with their boxes, you have to understand the
> environment I'm in as well. We're an oceanographic research institute and
> one of the filers (the F330) was installed on one of our ships. Needless to
> say that's not one of the most computer friendly environments. But the filer
> ran like a charm.

 Yes, the feature where the filer notifies their support staff of errors
and events is very helpful. We always buy spares kits for ours so that when
we do have some sort of failure we can swap a part out but it's also nice
to get an email saying "we just overnighted a new disk drive to you". Saves
us the overhead of contacting them first.


> I've noticed in this thread that there are some comments regarding the user
> interface. One of the benefits behind the network appliance is its light
> operating system which is optimized for being a file server. It's not loaded
> down with a heavy GUI or lots of unnecessary operating system layers. It's
> GREAT at what it does. But as one person said, this is getting into the
> realm of personal opinion.

 YES! My feelings exactly. A system should be as simple as possible
and for everything that that NetApp's can do, they do it with
performance of data throughput being the highest priority. System
reliability gained from a stable and lightweight OS (new versions
are copied over from a single 3.5" floppy) is very high.


> I'd like to mention another couple of things I love about the Net App
> filers. The first is that occasionally they do need to be rebooted in order
> to update the OS, add a new disk shelf or a tape changer or ..... (Note -
> they don't need to be shut down to add a new disk.) When you power up the
> system, it takes a whopping 1.25 minutes to boot our F740 with 450GB of
> disk. I'd like to see any Unix server match that. (And I've been a Unix
> fan/developer/admin/jack-of-all-trades for the past 20 years!) And talk
> about upgrading the OS - it's a 5 minute process that is fool-proof.

 Yep, very easy to sneak these upgrades and reboots in when you need to.

 The .snapshot facility is also a life/timesaver. The ability to
say "oops, shouldn't have deleted that - I'll just retrieve it out
of the .snapshot" and keep working is invaluable to my fat-fingered
engineers (and me).  Quotas which work, and can disguise true volume
sizes to commands like "df", are nice too.


> The other thing that I like about the filer is their multi-protocol support.
> Right now they natively support NFS, CIFS, and HTTP. The only other protocol
> I could ask for is Appletalk - not because I like it but because my users
> need it. I'm sure that will come down the line.

 We've looked at using the CIFS support but are sticking with a samba
server for that as Samba is a bit more robust for our environment. We run
them using TCPv3(udp) and have a very high level of performance and
reliability. I'll have to add that a high-performance network makes them
work that much better so udp is safe for us (no to mention about 40% faster
than tcp).


> Needless to say, I'm a happy customer. There's no way that we would ever get
> rid of the Network Appliance boxes we have. Go for it - you can't go wrong!

 Ditto. :-) We're being asked to look at other solutions for reasons I
can't get into but anything else would be a step backwards.

-- 
   Mike Loseke    | If at first you don't succeed,
 mike@verinet.com | increase the amperage.