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July 06, 2009
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Check mate. Chuck?
Posted by: Jim | July 07, 2009 at 04:59 PM
An alternative view ...
Enterprise Computing: A Myopic View of Unified Storage -- http://thestoragearchitect.com/
Posted by: Dan | July 15, 2009 at 07:46 PM
Chris,
As always your free to define unified storage any way you want.
But I think you're being unfair to me.
I explained the value of my definition here:
http://blogs.netapp.com/extensible_netapp/2008/08/what-is-a-unifi.html
And I explained why having a single replication mechanism is valuable.
I think you get confused with the words single and the words flexibility.
Having a single mechanism that works the same across all protocols does not imply a lack of flexibility.
I also think you misunderstood my point about management.
Clearly setting up NFS or CIFS has to be different, but provision the space for a CIFS and NFS export does not have to be different. That's what i meant.
cheers,
kostadis
Posted by: kostadis roussos | July 15, 2009 at 11:03 PM
Aren't FAS cluster nodes provisioned separately? A "single piece of hardware" is 2 separate managed entities, 2 Netapp clusters are 4 separately provisioned systems... not very unified in this contextual meaning.
Netapp is the easiest/best CIFS/NFS device i've worked with, but FC/iSCSI on the Netapp is a messy bolt-on in my personal opinion... Filerview, Snap manager, System Manager... none are perfect.. and you end up having to mix and match multiple tools to completely manage LUNs on the system was my experience.
I'm still practicing "Best of Breed" and haven't been satisfied with any of the "unified" solutions yet. For CIFS/NFS we standardize Netapp, but our FC goes elsewhere.
Posted by: Richard | July 30, 2009 at 08:59 PM
Richard,
You make some good points.
Having two systems to manage in an HA configuration as two distinct systems isn't exactly as unified as I would like. And part of what our ONTAP 8 vision is about is eliminating that.
As for the combination of system manager/etc our goal is to unify those interfaces.
For our enterprise customers provisioning manager does a significant amount of unification.
Although to get host connectivity we still require that you use a separate tool.
As for best of breed, NetApp storage is a no-compromise SAN solution, but I'd love to hear more about your thinking here.
cheers,
kostadis
Posted by: kostadis roussos | August 02, 2009 at 08:51 AM