Very true. Two words are key to this: maintenance, and resiliency.
Netapp's support is pretty damn good and it means I don't have to phaff about detecting the inevitable failed disks or even reporting them. And Netapp's clustering is good and has only been getting better in the two yers I've worked with them. I wouldn't want to run anything really key on an x4500 (and that's without going into the problems we had during a PoC running an oracle DB on same with zfs on top as it dealt with random reads/writes really really badly).
We still have a truckload of netapps at our place, and I still love them. Where OracleSun end up when their zfs-based product (Unified? Formerly Amber Rd) is more mature however, that remains to be seem (we trialled their beta when it was the only one they had in europe, it was in serious need of getting the basics right let alone the clever stuff).
no subject
Netapp's support is pretty damn good and it means I don't have to phaff about detecting the inevitable failed disks or even reporting them. And Netapp's clustering is good and has only been getting better in the two yers I've worked with them. I wouldn't want to run anything really key on an x4500 (and that's without going into the problems we had during a PoC running an oracle DB on same with zfs on top as it dealt with random reads/writes really really badly).
We still have a truckload of netapps at our place, and I still love them. Where
OracleSun end up when their zfs-based product (Unified? Formerly Amber Rd) is more mature however, that remains to be seem (we trialled their beta when it was the only one they had in europe, it was in serious need of getting the basics right let alone the clever stuff).