Sun ZFS Storage Appliance

[john]

Lol...

 

Anyway, to bring this back on track:

 

1) Is anyone buying a 7720 and if so can I come and work for them?

 

2) How do people feel the competition mounts up against the new 7x20 stuff? As far as I'm concerned, the big plus is still the Fishworks OS which beats anything else I've seen from a usability and management point of view (although I still want my user quotas done properly). Soulfish - how have found the EMC kit in comparison?

 

I'm going for a 7120 will that not do you?

 

I have spent a not so insignificant time this last month or so looking at storage (thanks to the delays in the new range coming out) and looked at Overland, EMC, NetApp and Hitachi.

 

The Overland was good spec, looks nice kit, fairly flexible but not to the same extent as the Oracle offerings, very much a product for Small Schools, Primarys, Nurserys, SMEs etc. Pricing was very good and the support package on offer from the supplier (Net Ctrl in this case) was looking very good but just couldn't keep pace with the Oracle kit.

EMC - too expensive, unless your Soulfish with his massive racks to fill (i've seen his racks!) then the pricing isn't really there, and just lacks the feel of the oracle kit, you need a degree in brain surgery to sort it out

NetApp - Very nice product, good spec but lacking usable disk space due to the way it calculates its redundancy, so for my budget I was getting 7110 sized storage for a good chunk more than a 7110 cost me. They claim that due to its super clever way of de-duping etc it will beat anything out there so 4TB of space will be the equivalent of say 8 or 9TB on a more traditional storage system

Hitachi - similar to the NetApp, more disk space avaliable to use, the only firm out there to build everything themselves so it said, they do the disks, controllers the lot so can control it through and through, and to be honest it looked a good setup but was just too costly for me.

 

Overall, as I've just been saying to someone on the phone, I think the Oracle product is once you've had one which I have you just don't quite find anything feeling the same as it, those little extras you get like the Analytic's, the fact I can just decide tomorrow I want to use iSCSI and not have to buy a card or pay a fee to get it they all just give it that cosy warm feeling which the others lacked. Maybe the storage market is different though with the more you spend, we were not spending huge sums compared to the system Soulfish has got from EMC (but he needed mega TB of storage!) but at the area I'm looking at and needing for my establishment then the Oracle solutions seem to fit the bill once again (and they came in the very nick of time!)

[Duke]

unless your Soulfish with his massive racks to fill (i've seen his racks!)

 

(ooh-err)

 

NetApp - [...] They claim that due to its super clever way of de-duping etc it will beat anything out there so 4TB of space will be the equivalent of say 8 or 9TB on a more traditional storage system

 

They tried this on me (after I'd purchased unfortunately):

 

Me: Okay, so I want to de-dupe my backups share to give Backup Exec more space to use, I've just set up a small test share here so we can try it?

Reseller Engineer: No problem, we just do this through the cli, then this through the bui, then this via the serial connection, and bingo!

M: That seems a little complicated, but cool, that de-duped by about 40% which will save me loads of space! So, now can we apply it to the full 2TB backups share?

RE: Oh, this box will only de-dupe 500GB volumes.

M: Huh? I wasn't aware of that licence limitation when we bought it... what do I need to upgrade then to de-dupe more?

RE: You can't.

M: What? I don't mind paying for a bigger license, this is something we really need to get this box working for us, having de-dupe limited to 500GB volumes is useless for me.

RE: No, you can't, it's a hardware limitation.

M: You mean the hardware somewhere literally can't handle de-duping more than 500GB?

RE: Well... it's more an artificial cap on this model, it could do more but we don't support it.

M: So how do I de-dupe more data?

RE: You'll need to buy the next model up in the range, that'll be £XX,XXX.

M: ...

[Soulfish]

(ooh-err)

 

 

 

They tried this on me (after I'd purchased unfortunately):

 

Me: Okay, so I want to de-dupe my backups share to give Backup Exec more space to use, I've just set up a small test share here so we can try it?

Reseller Engineer: No problem, we just do this through the cli, then this through the bui, then this via the serial connection, and bingo!

M: That seems a little complicated, but cool, that de-duped by about 40% which will save me loads of space! So, now can we apply it to the full 2TB backups share?

RE: Oh, this box will only de-dupe 500GB volumes.

M: Huh? I wasn't aware of that licence limitation when we bought it... what do I need to upgrade then to de-dupe more?

RE: You can't.

M: What? I don't mind paying for a bigger license, this is something we really need to get this box working for us, having de-dupe limited to 500GB volumes is useless for me.

RE: No, you can't, it's a hardware limitation.

M: You mean the hardware somewhere literally can't handle de-duping more than 500GB?

RE: Well... it's more an artificial cap on this model, it could do more but we don't support it.

M: So how do I de-dupe more data?

RE: You'll need to buy the next model up in the range, that'll be £XX,XXX.

M: ...

 

I at least had that sort of discussion with Netapp before we purchased. For some reason they just didn't want to be competitive compared to everyone else. It was a little crazy how the FAS2040 was actually more powerful than the FAS2050 - strange naming system!

[fox1977]

Hi All,

 

Closely following these posts on the 7120 and it looks the business. Can anyone give me an idea on starting price of the 7120. Just want to see if it is out of our league!!

[Duke]

Can anyone give me an idea on starting price of the 7120. Just want to see if it is out of our league!!

 

*poke* > Click

[john]

Hi All,

 

Closely following these posts on the 7120 and it looks the business. Can anyone give me an idea on starting price of the 7120. Just want to see if it is out of our league!!

 

Talk to Andy at The Cutter Project and he will see you right he has done for us all along and this time it was a very long hard battle and drawn out process due to the costs involved and what I wanted to do. Oh and if your wondering, youdo know you want one:

 

[Hebdenlad]

Talk to Andy at The Cutter Project and he will see you right he has done for us all along and this time it was a very long hard battle and drawn out process due to the costs involved and what I wanted to do. Oh and if your wondering, youdo know you want one:

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]8817[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]8818[/ATTACH]

 

John, You need to show a screen shot of the analytics and the view of the hardware under the maintenance tab.

[john]

John, You need to show a screen shot of the analytics and the view of the hardware under the maintenance tab.

 

All in good time Phil, IE after Christmas when we are using it fully

[Duke]

John, You need to show a screen shot of the analytics and the view of the hardware under the maintenance tab.

 

http://www.hardenhuish.wilts.sch.uk/avatar/s7410_normaluse_201002.png

 

http://www.hardenhuish.wilts.sch.uk/avatar/s7410_disks.png

 

Like that? (didn't include the maintenance view, but the disk analytics are prettier anyway)

 

Chris

[mbhmirc]

 

Sorry just had too

[Duke]

Haha, forgot about that video - those guys must have had fun.

[Hebdenlad]

And the guys in the development team are still having fun! you should see what's coming down the line.... but there I've said too much already...

[SchaubFD]

I urgently look for S7000 users with many CIFS users. Is the S7420 a good alternative for CIFS against Netapp filer?

[Hebdenlad]

I urgently look for S7000 users with many CIFS users. Is the S7420 a good alternative for CIFS against Netapp filer?

 

Hi there,

 

Thanks for the posting. Let's talk about this tomorrow.

 

You can reach me via email ([email protected]) or via the main switchboard (0118 924 0000).

[Duke]

I urgently look for S7000 users with many CIFS users. Is the S7420 a good alternative for CIFS against Netapp filer?

 

Depends what NetApp box you're talking about. Anything in the S7x20 range should beat a FAS2020 easily. The S7420 is top of the range so should beat most of NetApp's lower-end stuff. I have an S7410 and use it with 1800 CIFS users as well as 20 VMs over NFS with no issues.