Hey Jeff
Switch wise:
I don't think anything can beat a force10 switch. I don't have to think
twice about recommending them at all.
Their support is top notch.
Its got a cisco like syntax and config so if you are famil with cisco this
should be easy to learn. We have a E1200
( Http://www.force10networks.com ) at the heart of our datacenter everything
plugs into this or the S50's via 10GiGE.
We had Extreme Switches and I cant say one good thing about them. Their
products suck and their Support service sucks.
The technology used to power them is very very outdated. Its more software
based and that's the primary reason why it locks up
And cant handle the "extreme bandwidth" requirements of our field. The force10
has not had 1 hiccup since we launched it. They are rock solid.
The E1200 has a 5TB Back Plane.
Storage wise:
We have over a 100TB's of Isilon. Been down the san route and I am not
looking back.
Our Setup..
Over 1000 Procs and 160 or so workstations.
Isilon has been solid for us. Though like anything its not without its hiccups
we paid that price 5 years ago when we helped alpha the product but today its
running great.
-Ease of use and management of the cluster I don't think there is a contender out there.
-Snapshots are nice easy to manage.
-Quota systems, Hard, Soft and Alert.
-Replication software is fast! ( SyncIQ )
-Aspera will run native on the Isilons we use this to manage and replicate
our data to Vancouver disaster recovery cluster in case this log cabin burns
down :) Its a software wan accelerator ( really amazing ) (It will increase
your wan link speed 100x )
-Adding storage is like popping in a removable drive. Connect a few cables
and power on. Having redundancy is what I like the most.
While I am sure the single Stream performance is not as good as the newer
bluearcs (though I am sure its right behind it ) You do get redundancy with
your data but also the systems serving the data. You have the options to
independently grow your performance over the size of your cluster by adding
Accelerator nodes or just storage or a combo of both.
-Isilon can monitor your cluster remotely if you opt too and alert you of
anything they think might fail like a disk that might start to fail they can
predict this and soft fail ahead of time.
-I know everyone bags on SATA drives but I have had more Fiber drives fail
in one year on my DDN and Flame Arrays than on our 40 Node Isilon Cluster.
Which has about 480 drives in it : 4 failed in the last year.
-As you know it uses infiniband as its backend communication protocol and
infiniband is slowly making its way into many other products we use here on
the highend compositing side of things. While I do not know for sure it would
seem likely that isilon could enable front end use of these infiniband
ports for direct access or plug into another infiniband switch to enable
highspeed access to the cluster. I know they have 10gige support or will
be soon in the form of an accelerator node or of the like. :)
This would put off having to utilize the gige ports on each node and just
have 2 10gige fiber ports used to feed the network switch.
I am partial to Isilon just how some might be partial to Netapp or Bluearc.
But I am a sucker for ease of use and management functionality ohh and the
Blue Lights.
Price wise in the past Isilon has done better against the rest thought I
know you might be able to get a good deal with Bluearc right now as they are
competing very aggressively for market share.
What it all comes down to is the environment get an Isilon in and test it
out, Get a bluearc or a netapp and test it. I know its tuff sometimes to get
demos in but these days they are all eager to get another sale in. Isilon
will put a demo in no prob. Bluearc and Netapp it might take a bunch of
meetings and moving it up the chain of command..
I would love to hear feedback on all storage out there as well. Some people
don't have the time to demo or just don't want to deal with it. We use to
have lots of time to test and play with storage :) Thought might have
some time coming up if this Strike Continues. Grrrrrrr
-S
|