>>>>> "ak" == Ahmed Kamal <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
ak> I need to answer and weigh against the cost.
I suggest translating the reliability problems into a cost for
mitigating them: price the ZFS alternative as two systems, and keep
the second system offline except for nightly backup. Since you care
mostly about data loss, not availability, this should work okay. You
can lose 1 day of data, right?
I think you need two zpools, or zpool + LVM2/XFS, some kind of
two-filesystem setup, because of the ZFS corruption and
panic/freeze-on-import problems. Having two zpools helps with other
things, too, like if you need to destroy and recreate the pool to
remove a slog or a vdev, or change from mirroring to raidz2, or
something like that.
I don't think it's realistic to give a quantitative MTDL for loss
caused by software bugs, from netapp or from ZFS.
ak> The EMC guy insisted we use 10k Fibre/SAS drives at least.
I'm still not experienced at dealing with these guys without wasting
huge amounts of time. I guess one strategy is to call a bunch of
them, so they are all wasting your time in parallel. Last time I
tried, the EMC guy wanted to meet _in person_ in the financial
district, and then he just stopped calling so I had to guesstimate his
quote from some low-end iSCSI/FC box that Dell was reselling. Have
you called netapp, hitachi, storagetek? The IBM NAS is netapp so you
could call IBM if netapp ignores you, but you probably want the
storevault which is sold differently. The HP NAS looks weird because
it runs your choice of Linux or Windows instead of
WeirdNASplatform---maybe read some more about that one.
Of course you don't get source, but it surprised me these guys are
MUCH worse than ordinary proprietary software. At least netapp stuff,
you may as well consider it leased. They leverage the ``appliance''
aspect, and then have sneaky licenses, that attempt to obliterate any
potential market for used filers. When you're cut off from support
you can't even download manuals. If you're accustomed to the ``first
sale doctrine'' then ZFS with source has a huge advantage over netapp,
beyond even ZFS's advantage over proprietary software. The idea of
dumping all my data into some opaque DRM canister lorded over by
asshole CEO's who threaten to sick their corporate lawyers on users on
the mailing list offends me just a bit, but I guess we have to follow
the ``market forces.''
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