[BBLISA] Fileserver opinion

[John Orthoefer]

I just have to put in my 2 bits on this.   

There is a LOT of engineering that EMC and Netapp does.   I've had to fight this battle before, the 1TB SATA hard drive that you get from NewEgg and xTB of disk storage you get from Netapp are NOT comparable.  There is a ton functionality that you get out of a Netapp that doesn't exist in a raw drive, or even with the drive plugged into a linux box running EXT3.  

The Netapp is designed to serve data, it's kernel is tailored to get blocks of data off the disk and push it to the wire.  It runs a custom filesystem, which is where a lot of their technology is. You're never going to get the performance out of Linux box doing the same job unless you put at least a significant fraction of the man-hours that Netapp has put into their product in to it (and at most places People Time is expensive.) 

Now if you have a Linux NFS/Server you are happy with, that is great.   But if you want a box you can drop in a datacenter, spend a few hours setting up, and know that you can fill the wires with data, you need to spend the money on a Netapp.  

Yes I guess I have drank the NetApp Koolade but I've seen way too many places trying to make some Linux/Windows Solution work, when what they want is a NetApp.

johno


On Aug 11, 2010, at 6:24 PM, Grant Young wrote:

> 
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> Everybody likes to rag on EMC and other storage vendors for charging so much per terabyte but they engineer the headaches out of the storage.  
>