[OT] Re: [CentOS] Filers, filesystems, etc.

Chris Mauritz chrism at imntv.com
Wed Nov 9 21:04:17 UTC 2005


Robin Mordasiewicz wrote:

> 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.


Netapp filers are wonderful.  The ability to have a fast redundant file 
system that can periodically take snapshots of your data is a very good 
thing to have, especially in industries where you may be called upon to 
"roll back" your data to specific points in time on demand.  They are 
also extraordinarily expensive.  Same goes for EMC solutions.  They are 
both doing very well on Wall Street applications these days and that's 
where I typically run into them.  And in those environments, their cost 
is more or less statistical noise in the overall IT budget.  For your 
typical small business or even mid-size business they're overkill and 
overpriced.  For myself and on a few consulting gigs, NFS and samba have 
served me well, depending on the application, running on vanilla 
RHEL/CentOS systems with a pile of SATA disks hanging off 3Ware cards.

Cheers,
.



More information about the CentOS mailing list