Leonard Isham wrote:
I will attest that NetApp is an excellent choice. NetApp is more pricey, but they do have an entry level system called the FAS270, which is leaps ahead of an EMC Clarion if you can even compare them, and for the added flexibilty the price is not very much more. I think NetApp pretty much stands alone. I don't think another solution will allow you to do CIFS, NFS, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel all from the same platform, but there may be. I have used the RedHat Clustering solution and it was a hassle.
P.s. I have nothing to do with the NetApp company, but I just love their product after having used it in almost every place I have worked at.
My EMC sales guy (who will be here in a bit) is trying to sell me a Celera NS500 series NAS to front-end a Clarion. I've worked with both NetApp and Celerra's in the past and prefer the separation in the EMC model from the disk-subsystem. Both are great for high-performance/high-availability CIFS/NFS services. Never used either for iSCSI although that will likely be used on this system as we move into production.
Dave www.hornfordassociates.com