| Faeandar 2007-06-10, 7:14 pm |
| On Sat, 09 Jun 2007 11:11:53 -0700, virtualjack
<jack-nospam@pobox.com> wrote:
>On Jun 9, 10:11 am, "Rob Turk" <wipe_this_r.t...@chello.nl> wrote:
>
>Their main motivation is that they are hoping to leverage the Clarion
>infrastructure
>and our considerably larger relationship with Dell/EMC.
>
>Unfortunately EMC doesn't seem to be willing to give us any type of
>demo Celerra unit
>at this time so my analysis is strictly based on their documentation
>and answers from
>the Sales Engineers (who frankly don't seem to understand the product
>very well).
When a vendor is not willing to let you try before you buy that should
be a warning sign. And when the SE does not understand what it is
he's supposed to support, well that's another warning sign.
>
>So real world experience of the Celerra is what I'm most looking for.
>People who have
>migrated from one to another (either way) would be fabulous, but even
>plain real world
>experience of the Celerra would help (EMC also hasn't located a decent
>Customer reference
> yet).
I would wager that's because they do not have one for their NAS. I ma
a NetApp biggot when it comes to traditional NAS so keep that in mind
as I spout off about both.
I do not have any direct EMC experience so all my info on that end is
purely anecdotal. But I do talk with other shops and the few that
have had EMC NAS got rid of it at the earliest opportunity, usually
following some major outage.
I spoke to one shop where they removed all the EMC NAS blades after
they took a 6 hour downtime for EMC to perform a DART upgrade. That
was it, no hardware swaps, no data migration, nothing. Just an OS
upgrade. That happened twice so it wasn;t isolated. They got rid of
it within a month after the second one. I don't recall what they
moved to so it may not have been NetApp.
If you go looking for shops that are heavy users of NAS it is my
opinion you will not find a single one that uses EMC. I'm certain
you'll find some shops where they have alot of EMC SAN and need NAS
for one or two things, so they drop in a Celerra and it "works
enough". But any real users will not touch that stuff.
>
>The 3020 is working fine although ndmpd backups are not going as fast
>as we would like -
>it is probably more of an issue with the backup system - although I'm
>beginning to think
>that my RAID group & Aggregate configuration is sub-optimal.
Backups on a filer simply use dump, so nothing magic there. Many
times when backups are problematic it's because there are a ton of
files. There is nothing any file system will do to fix that for a
dump-type backup. Snapshots, block level backups, etc all mask the
real issue. But for a full file system dump you're just hosed if
that's your problem.
Post your aggregate layout and we can give you pointers if it's truly
sub-optimal.
Changing out something that is "working fine" is usually a sign of bad
things to come.
>
>---Jack
>
>P.S. Based on what I've read so far, the Celerra has a more feature
>rich CIFS implementation.
>The spare "head/cpu board" is a nice feature as are the disjoint CIFS/
>Unix ACL's. On the other
>hand, the Celerra seems more wasteful of disk allocation and more
>difficult to manage in our
>environment which is script based.
Unless EMC deviated from the CIFS spec I don't see how they can have a
more rich feature set than NetApp. I'm pretty sure the only way to
get more CIFS features than NetApp is to use Windows NAS. Which, btw,
I would recommend before I recommend the Celerra.
I assume the 3020 is not clustered? With 12 clusters I have 8 that
had 100% availability last year. 2 of those required RAM swaps, the
rest were OS bugs causing panics. But because of clustering there was
no impact to access.
~F
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