> Jeff, I know you omitted NetApp from your list because you're already
> familiar with their hardware, and have weighed in on it before:
> http://seriss.com/cgi-bin/rush/newsgroup-threaded.cgi?-view+743
> http://seriss.com/cgi-bin/rush/newsgroup-threaded.cgi?-view+746
>
> I know Net Apps have saved many companies in the past,
> though now I hear BlueArc and IsoLan mentioned a lot more these days.
Yes, I intentionally left out Netapp for this and other reasons. It's true
that Netapp is battle-tested and is a first rate-product. I believe their
software to be "best of breed". I like their products, truly. Unfortunately,
their product designs have not really kept pace with industry trends. No
where is this better demonstrated in their late arrival into the clustered
storage arena (they had to buy a company called Spinnaker before they could
ship their first clustered storage product). While they now have a clustered
product (ONTAP GX), they are not really pushing it, and word on the street
is because it is not really ready for production. Having said that, I
thought I heard somewhere that WETA (or was it ILM?) was in the process of
rolling out a massive GX deployment. So I could be wrong about this.
> I think Saker has stories to tell about IsoLan that you missed
> at one of the last Sysadmin Bash meetings at the Cat & Fiddle.
> And I think Rob Minsk is quite familiar now with BlueArc.
> Anyone else, feel free to chime in.
>
Great, would love to hear about it.
>> Sun, SGI, Agami and OnStor.
>
> SGI? Are they still around? ;)
Oh yes. In fact, I think SGI is betting their turnaround on the highly
competitive storage market. As you know, they are really getting behind
Linux in a big way. Most company's today selling proprietary storage &
networking products are tapping into the open source community in some
fashion, so it is natural SGI does the same. Their products are still better
tuned for the academic and government space, but I think they are looking
more and more at the enterprise and SMB markets as well.
>
> I wouldn't usually advise investing in hardware companies that
> have filed for bankruptcy.
Yes, but they are doing fine now. They were re-listed on Nasdaq last year,
and their stock price, while not at an all-time high, is healthy. More and
more they are making news, for good reasons, not bad. So yes, I think they
are still worth a look.
> That said, back in 2001 I helped setup a render farm config at ICT
> which involved a used rack mount R10K 2 proc 225MHz SGI Origin 200
> from GET.COM for ($6750), and two 450G ADTX raid5 systems (for $6000 each)
> from RFX.COM hanging off it.
>
> At the time I knew of several CG companies using ADTX raids with the
> SGI, and had gone through failure modes with them, and they worked
> quite well. And of course RFX support had always been great, so we liked
> that aspect. Within a few weeks one of the two raids had a bad drive,
> the raid went into "degraded" mode but continued file serving.
> I hot-swapped in a new drive while a 16 proc Onyx was rendering
> a heavy job on the raid, and the new drive configured itself and
> jumped online.
>
> For switching, the network admin at ICT wanted to go with an
> Alied Telesys switch with dual fiber uplinks to the Origin.
>
> I think Rob Groome later inherited that whole setup after I finished
> my contract work for them, so if he's still tuned into the group,
> he can maybe weigh in on how all that carried for the years after,
> or if it all had to be thrown out of a window onto Lincoln Blvd.
> It'd be fun to know if that setup is still in place.
Their next-gen storage products are found in the InfiniteStorage series. I
believe these are all Linux-based NAS solutions. I was looking at this a few
years ago for one client, and passed on it mostly because of price.
Fortunately, today I work with clients where price is not so much as issue
any more.
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