> Seriously? Do you know anything about the NetApp platform? I'm hoping this
> is a genuine question...
>
> Off the top of my head nearly all of them. Some of them have artificial
> limitations because they learned the hard way that if you give customers
> enough rope they'll hang themselves. For instance "unlimited snapshots".
> Do I even need to begin to tell you what a horrible, HORRIBLE idea that is?
> "Why can't I get my space back?" Oh, just do a snapshot list and figure out
> which one is still holding the data. What? Your console locks up for 8
> hours when you try to list out the snapshots? Huh... that's weird.
>
> It's sort of like that whole "unlimited filesystems" thing. Just don't ever
> reboot your server, right? Or "you can have 40pb in one pool!!!". How do
> you back it up? Oh, just mirror it to another system? And when you hit a
> bug that toasts both of them you can just start restoring from tape for the
> next 8 years, right? Or if by some luck we get a zfsiron, you can walk the
> metadata for the next 5 years.
>
> NVRAM has been replaced by flash drives in a ZFS world to get any kind of
> performance... so you're trading one high priced storage for another. Your
> snapshot creation and deletion is identical. Your incremental generations
> is identical. End-to-end checksums? Yup.
>
> Let's see... they don't have block-level compression, they chose dedup
> instead which nets better results. "Hybrid storage pool" is achieved
> through PAM modules. Outside of that... I don't see ANYTHING in your list
> they didn't do first.
Wow -- I've spoken to many NetApp partisans over the years, but you might
just take the cake. Of course, most of the people I talk to are actually
_using_ NetApp's technology, a practice that tends to leave even the most
stalwart proponents realistic about the (many) limitations of NetApp's
technology...
For example, take the PAM. Do you actually have one of these, or are you
basing your thoughts on reading whitepapers? I ask because (1) they are
horrifically expensive (2) they don't perform that well (especially
considering that they're DRAM!) (3) they're grossly undersized (a 6000
series can still only max out at a paltry 96G -- and that's with virtually
no slots left for I/O) and (4) they're not selling well. So if you
actually bought a PAM, that already puts you in a razor-thin minority of
NetApp customers (most of whom see through the PAM and recognize it for
the kludge that it is); if you bought a PAM and think that it's somehow a
replacement for the ZFS hybrid storage pool (which has an order of magnitude
more cache), then I'm sure NetApp loves you: you must be the dumbest,
richest customer that ever fell in their lap!
- Bryan
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bryan Cantrill, Sun Microsystems Fishworks. http://blogs.sun.com/bmc
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