SUMMARY: SunA1000-72gb disks // QuantumSnap12000 & Solaris .. queries

Hi all,

Got a number of replies and now I have a better idea about these
issues.  Bottom line:

-> No certainty on the issue of using 72 gig scsi drives in the a1000 ;
apparently there are cases where one can get away with swapping in
larger (non-sun branded) disks into sun hardware environment and get
away with it.  No explicit answer from anyone who has done this with an
A-1000 (either with sun-branded or not .. 72 gig disks).

-> Feedback from a number of Quantum Snap users indicate that these
boxes are essentially intel-hardware running pared-down linux-based OS
with IDE hard drives and administration via a web-GUI. Some control is
provided over directly editing users / groups files to provide decent
integration of NFS shares. Clearly the target market of these products
is more aimed at Windows environments based on observations on the
quantum support pages, and the fact that the snap server can do "user
management / authentication" against either an NT domain or a Novell NDS
server. I cannot find evidence to indicate that "snapshot" features
exist as robustly as those found in NetApp units (for example) although
there is software available (extra) for use with Snap servers that will
synch files between a "primary" and "backup" snap server (on a per-file
basis) as a means towards maintaining a redundant / failover setup. 

(If I recieve feedback further clarifying the user:group NFS share
issues significantly from Quantum tech support I may post an addendum to
this summary in the future.)

Bottom line for the SnapServer -- looks like it will do NFS shares
`decently' despite being a product aimed at Windows users, but may not
be
suitable for environments where the disks get a brutal workout, and
certainly isn't as feature-rich as some NAS devices avaiable (albeit
typically at higher cost it seems).

-> I did recieve glowing feedback from one site using a NetApp filer,
stressing the importance of snapshot features, fast file access for web
site content (MANY small files, with content growing at a quick rate),
and suggesting that the quantum snap rig may not provide such snappy
disk access (likely since snap is purely IDE whereas the NetApp was FCAL
disk subsystem).

Many thanks to those who replied to my query:

John Littell
Steve Hammond
Don Mies
Ryan McEwan
Victor Karpovich



---Tim Chipman



----original questions follow----

(1) Does anyone know if the Sun A1000 will accept & use 72-gig SCSI
disks? The specs pages indicate official support for 36 gig drives as
the maximum per-drive capacity. Our sales rep mumbled something about
72gig disk support "eventually" at the start of the year. I'm just
curious if anyone has actually installed larger format disks to see what
happens. (ie, if they work!)


(2) does anyone have experience with Quantum SnapServer 12000 NAS ? (as
seen at the URL below)

http://www.snapserver.com/products/12000/index.asp

(model 12000 is the only one with a decent amount of storage really,
IMHO). In particular I'm curious about user-management issues, ie,
assuming you have NFS shares from the NAS-> Solaris boxes, is it
relatively painless to setup users:groups on the NAS device which are
similar (identical to?) those used on solaris .. ?

For that matter, if anyone has any strong positive experiences with NAS
devices I'm interested to hear. I do understand that NetApps are pretty
decent but from what I can see the pricing isn't quite as competitive as
for the quantum thing (which is $15k USD for 960gig raw storage or 750
gig in Raid5). However, maybe this is a case of "get what you pay for" ?

Thanks very much!