On Wed, 9 Nov 2005, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
On Wed, 2005-11-09 at 11:00 +0100, Henk van Lingen wrote:
Hi Bryan, Please tell. I have to replace our old Sun Enterprise fileserver (solaris8), which does NFS and Samba (homedirectories, projects file space). It will be x86 hardware, but I'm looking for the best filesystem for the job (let's say one terabyte). It has to have quota and ACL support.
NetApp is very costly per $ versus traditional file storage. But the Data OnTap OS with WAFL filesystem was basically designed by 2 of Sun's original NFS designers. WAFL works very different than most traditional UNIX server filesystems.
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.