On Feb 9, 2010, at 1:55 PM, matthew patton wrote: >> It might help people to understand how ridiculous they >> sound going on and on >> about buying a premium storage appliance without any >> storage. > > Since I started this, let me explain to those who can't begin to understand > why I proposed something so "stupid". At work (branch of a federal gov't > big-5 Department) I need 40TB but have next to nothing in budget. (For some > reason all you damn citizens think you're entitled to keep most of your > paychecks to yourself instead living off what I decide to give you in > foodstamps and rent-controled housing.) Therefore, I can't afford let alone > justify the preposterous premium demanded by "enterprise" EMC/Sun/IBM/NetApp. > I can really use dedup, (integrity would be nice), and reasonable rack and > power footprint since I'm out of that too. > > I can't exactly march into my boss' office and propose that we build my own > at-home special which is 16 WD RE2/3 drives $(60) in a $70 case, $100 power > supply, four 4-in-3 modules ($30) and a Chenbro SAS expander ($250) now can > I... > > Aside: I find it laughable for anyone to claim a J4500 is "premium" anything. > IBM DS800, EMC Symetrix, NetApp FAS5xxx, sure. But a glorified JBOD > enclosure? Put down the damn cool-aid!
I don't disagree with any of the facts you list, but I don't think the alternatives are fully described by "Sun vs. much cheaper retail parts." We face exactly this same decision with buying RAM for our servers (maybe more so since it is probably even more difficult to argue there is a difference in RAM chip quality when the same manufacturer's part is sourced from Sun vs. elsewhere). Sun's RAM prices are much higher than retail, exactly as you describe here. The first thing to do is negotiate...they discount RAM heavily when threatened with sourcing it elsewhere. But you'll still wind up with a difference, and not necessarily a tiny one. The thing we consider is how we'll live with a failure. If it's 100% Sun RAM there's no question. We call, they come out and we're back in business. If it isn't Sun will blame the 3rd party RAM and insist we try without the third party RAM. Sometimes that's not possible (we don't have enough Sun RAM to run the application). The 3rd party vendor might blame the Sun RAM (which is generally easier to test without). We will have to spend time testing and/or debating with different warranty providers to get it resolved. That increases our hours to fix it and/or the downtime (or we just throw out all the RAM and don't use the warranty, buying 3rd party). Sometimes that makes sense (older server being repurposed for non-critical stuff), sometimes it doesn't (our most critical processes). So we really don't view it as RAM vs. RAM comparison. It's more RAM + easy warranty service vs. RAM + more difficult warranty service. Both can provide the same service to us, but under different cost/restoration conditions down the road. I think it's the same thing here. If you want a fully supported product down the road where everything that goes wrong is Sun's fault, then buy that from Sun. If you want something much cheaper but where you will need to negotiate future fixes, assemble it from various sources. If you want a hybrid buy as much hardware as you can from a single vendor (preferably pre-integrated/as a single product vs. assemble yourself) and then run OpenSolaris on it (maybe w/Sun support contract). In some ways its nice to have the option. You can get similar services at hugely different price points...7410 cluster all the way down to white box home NAS. Good luck, Ware _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
