Dear Managers, Thank you for your responses. Let me start by clarifying that the issue with Solaris 9 and NFS is not with Solaris but with how the Snaps interact with Solaris 9 NFS. Sorry for the confusion. On to the responses. It seems that (money notwithstanding) the safest bet is with Network Appliance. There have also been numerous alternatives proposed (will have to visit all the vendors) along with Sun Storage and Apple Xserve RAID. As foar as I know, for my customer, the Sun solutions are prohibitively expensive. The Apple Xserve RAID may be a nice robust system but customer does not want another OS in the current environment. I have to look at prices for NetAPPs and the other options. Thank you again for all your help. Special thanks to Tim Chipman for his pointers and detailed response. Following you will find the original question and responses (in no particular order). ===================== ORIGINAL QUESTION ===================== Long-time listener, first time caller. We have been using Snap servers for quite some time to perform our backups (using our home-grown scripts). They have been OK but flaky but we always managed with some hacks to deal with the problems. However, we just moved to Solaris 9 and NFS mounting is a nightmare. I am looking into network attached storage ideas for something in the order of 2+TB. RAID is good, performance requirements are not strict (we will only use them for backups). I looked at www.fastora.com and I like their IDE-type of setup. Does anyone have any suggestions or recommendations for what products or vendors to look for? ===================== RESPONSES ===================== From: Fergason.com Network Appliance. Might be a bit more expensive that you want to spend, but they are true appliances. Incredibly easy to setup and maintain. They have a Nearstore 200, which starts at 8Tb and expands to 96Tb. From: "Grzegorz Bakalarski" Anyway you may look for e.g. following vendors: www.proware.com.tw www.infortrend.com www.nexsan.com, www.synetic.net www.acnc.com www.maxtronic.com, www.fibrenetix.co.uk and many, many similar. proware, synetic, acns(JetStor), maxtor(Arena) use more or less the same raid controller (intel based) and interface, Infortrend is build around PowerPC chipset (similar to SUN Storage 3310/3311/3510 array). NexSan uses own chipset base on motorola... From: "Linux Admin" it really depends on how deep your pockets are. Netapp R200 is nice, NetAPP OS is awesome. The unit is a cadilac as far pricing. it plays nice with Sun, Linux , MS. From: "David Foster" We are using Nexsan ATAboy2 arrays (2.6TB) and have been extremely happy with them. Cheaper because they use commodity ATA drives, but performance has been similar to our Sun T3 arrays. Just be sure to configure a hot-spare as these drives are slightly less reliable than the much more expensive SCSI or FC disks. We indeed had one go bad, the unit picked up the hot-spare and didn't miss a beat, and Nexsan replaced the drive immediately. The web-based interface for the Nexsans is superb. From: "John Malick" Sun's 5310 NAS storage is great. Check it out. From: "Tim Chipman" -not quite clear why NFS is a nightmare for you .. maybe if you want to clarify what you were trying / what you are trying to mount - backup etc .. further clarification/resolution might be possible there (?) -for what it is worth: We've got an IDE_based disk array from AC&NC, "JetStor III", which I've been very happy with. Price was good (~$9k USD for 8 x 200 gig, or ~1.4tb in raid5 without hot-spare) and similar things can be had for slightly less per gig from them especially if larger capacity is your target (12 / 14 / 16 disk arrays ...). For what it is worth, AVOID like the plague and large Maxtor IDE disks, we had serious problems with them.. Seagate disks have better warranty and fewer failure issues. -we also recently bought an array from Winchester Systems, also IDE based, an "older refurb" model that I got specifically b/c it was cheap and we needed another brick for a development/test box. This one I haven't tested much yet, but seems to work well, so I can also recommend them. IF you can get an off-lease or "last years unit" you will find great prices. OR go the full splurge and buy the latest and greatest, whatever you prefer :-) anyhow, in general, for sure IDE based units will be WAY! cheaper than SCSI/Fcal disk models. Performance will be a bit lower too but probably not a big issue for your needs. also, for ref, our Jetstor unit with 200gig IDE disks is about the same performance as an A1000 (all scsi disks) so clearly the IDE-based units aren't "junk" (as some might tell you?) finally, as you have found, there are MANY vendors selling this sort of stuff ... (IDE disk arrays) ... lots of options. Just be picky with the brand of disk used, IMHO Maxtor is toxic to be avoided. (we had bad blocks pile up on 6 of our 8 disks in the array in their first 18 months of service, totally unacceptable). From: Send an Instant Message "Solo" Hi there This may at first sound like a joke, but I am dead serious when I say you ought to check out Apple's Xserve RAID. They're beating anything else hands down both in price and performance. Even Oracle were amazed by it and they now run Apple internally for all their SAN infra. The Xserve RAID uses IDE disks and you connect to it through fibrechannel. Scales up to 5.6 TB and has a number of certifications for various SAN products including Veritas Volume Manager. http://www.apple.com/xserve/raid From: "Alex J. Avriette" Hi Gregor. It's tough to beat the Apple XServe RAID for dollars-per-gig. In a similar homegrown setup a couple years ago, I installed 2tb of XServe and it did the trick just fine. From: "Derek Olsen" I dont understand your statement about nfs mounting being a nightmare on solaris 9 but I will give you some info I came across while looking for NAS storage besides netapp and snap appliance. This product is something I considered in an environment where I could use ide drives but I dont have any experience with it beyond the documentation. http://www.open-e.com/index.php?g=product〈=de&aid=153 The EMC NS line of NAS devices when populated with ata drives instead of fibre channel comes in at a pretty reasonable price. Obviously what I consider a reasonable price was in relation to the importance of the project I was working on and the associated revenue so it may not be right for you. From: jastrologo netapp fas250. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Helps protect you from nasty viruses. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail _______________________________________________ sunmanagers mailing list sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org http://www.sunmanagers.org/mailman/listinfo/sunmanagersReceived on Sat Jan 15 19:31:33 2005
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