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

[Chris Mauritz]

Leonard Isham wrote:

>On 11/9/05, Robin Mordasiewicz <robin at bullseye.tv> 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.
>>    
>>
>
>Anyone considered or used OpenFiler?  It's based on CentOS.
>http://www.openfiler.com/
>  
>

I have had some contact with the company.  Frankly, I thought they were 
rather expensive when you consider what's under the hood.  I also wasn't 
too thrilled with their idea of service...."uh, if your system fails you 
can ship it back to us in the UK and we'll ship you another one."   But 
maybe they've gotten better.

Cheers,