Am 11.12.2010 um 17:38 schrieb Rudi Ahlers: > > Yes, I know. But the problem I have with NetApp is that it's not build > for a smaller market. i.e. a client looking to start small and scale > as he needs, and can afford to. > > The NetGear's allow exactly just that. One can start small and grow as > needed. There's no need to over budget or over spend. Often a client > only needs about 5 to 12 TB storage, but with high availability. I > suppose the redundant PSU's do help a bit with that, and both TheCus > and ReadyNAS can be setup in high availability with 2 devices. > The other question is if it actually works. Too many of the low-cost devices eat the data on the drives, when the motherboard or the controller fries... With luck, you can read the data on one of the drives... If the client only needs 12TB, there's shurely a NetApp that is cheaper but only scales to 10 or 20TB. If the client has maxed that out and needs to go beyond that, he needs to buy a bigger filer-head + shelves and migrate his data (AFAIK, that's possible, at a charge...). It would be a waste of money to have a filer-head that can scale to 100TB sit with only 12TB. For 100TB, you need bigger filer-hardware. Most people who say "we need to scale to 100TB" never reach it - it's wishful thinking that their business will continue to grow like in the 1st year. You might want to try to get a quote from Oracle for a Unified Storage Appliance 7320 and compare it with one of NetApps entry-level offerings. With 100TB, DIY is out of the question ;-) BTW: what does the client do with the disk-space? What's the access- pattern? Rainer