[BBLISA] Fileserver opinion

[Daniel Feenberg]

On Thu, 12 Aug 2010, Grant Young wrote:

> When you can get a basic 1TB drive for $100 at your favorite vendor it 
> is a hard sell that data center quality costs at least 10x that.  But 
> you definitely get what you pay for.

At 10x we would be all Netapp because it is fast and trouble-free, but the 
Netapp quotes we get are closer to 100x raw storage cost. Perhaps we 
aren't getting the best deals, but no prices are posted on the Netapp 
website.

Furthermore, the annual maintainance starts at more than the purchase 
price of raw space, and increases with time, so that after 3 years 
maintainance cost per quarter is similar to the purchase price of raw 
disk.

>
> OTOH, I do believe you can put together a creditable alternative from 
> parts and open source if you pay attention.  Once you've done that 
> you'll appreciate what you get from a NetApp, EMC, HP, or whatever 
> storage vendor you choose, in terms of manageability and support, not to 
> mention scale and performance.
>

It really depends on what you need. We have Netapp storage and FreeBSD 
storage. They each have their place. One thing I would point out is that 
if you have an inadaquate amount of high quality storage, that is probably 
much much worse than having plenty of low quality storage. If my disk is 
full, that is much worse than being slow, or down a few days a year.

Too many system administrators take the view that if A is better than B, 
then B is worthless. That isn't good logic. Not everyone needs high 
performance for every file. A local university provides 25 meg of storage 
on an EMC box for each faculty member. Is that the right way to spend a 
limited amount of money?

The Netapp isn't even uniformly better than home made solutions. The home 
made FreeBSD box draws a tenth the electricity. Is that not an advantage 
to be weighed, even if price is no object?

Daniel Feenberg