on 4/14/09 10:30 PM, Edward Ned Harvey said: > But if I simply buy a normal solaris server and turn on NFS and Samba > .... Acknowledge that I'll do my admin on CLI instead of GUI ... > which is presently working on some random blackbox PC test setup ... > then I can do everything I can think of.
UT Austin used to also do that, years ago. Then somewhere along they line they discovered how much time they were spending doing all the building, configuration, and ongoing management of these things that they could replace them with NetApp appliances and lower their overall total cost of ownership, while giving their staff a lot more free time to work on other things, provide a more reliable and more scalable service, etc.... I see absolutely nothing wrong with where you are today, and what you're planning on doing in the near future. If that works for you, then I support it whole-heartedly. And I might even try to do such things for myself here at home. On the other hand, that kind of thing no longer works for us, and we've found that the storage appliance model is a huge improvement in our environment, for a wide multitude of reasons. With regards to storage vendors, the two big ones we currently know best are NetApp and EMC. With NetApp, we deal with their sales and support people directly, whereas with EMC we buy through and get our support from Dell. We know that we get special treatment from both Dell and EMC, for a variety of historical reasons. Suffice it to say that I don't think we ever see any of the typical EMC sales shenanigans, and most of our sales relationship with Dell is "Here's what we want, here's what we think it will cost based on what we've seen with our standard discount on the website, please give us an official quote and ship on or by this date". I don't know that we get particularly special treatment from NetApp. For them, we're a relatively small fish. We just don't have that many filers, and they aren't loaded up with that many licenses. Any recent changes in their behaviour with regards to us would probably be a result of potential competition from a third vendor. > My NFS and CIFS tests have > been successful. "zfs send" is supported to transmit a snapshot from > one system to another. I can think of a few features that are > missing, such as parallel or distributed filesystem ... but I can't > name anything that's super critical for a small business. For a small business, no -- probably not. But as you grow into the larger Enterprise space, there are other things that start becoming more important. -- Brad Knowles <[email protected]> If you like Jazz/R&B guitar, check out LinkedIn Profile: my friend bigsbytracks on YouTube at <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> http://preview.tinyurl.com/bigsbytracks _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
