I recently purchased, this past Friday, my first, very own, NetApp storage system: the really, really, really cute StoreVault S300.
Like my fellow blogger Steve Klinkner, I was looking to put together a home enterprise storage solution.
My requirements were fairly simple. I wanted a device that was easy to setup, cheap, very reliable, supported CIFS and iSCSI and had a very simple disk-to-disk backup solution that was fast and space efficient. I wanted CIFS because I have 3 desktop computers and two laptops and I want all of my data to be available where ever I am in my house.
I was not looking for a Disaster Recovery solution.
My original plan was to do-it-your-self. Buy hard drives, buy a white-box computer, use Linux, use Samba, use Amanda, suffer, endure, grow and learn. I was even thinking about experimenting with OpenFiler.
And then I saw an S300 in the lab, and I thought, maybe, just maybe, I was thinking about this all wrong.
The S300 runs ONTAP. And ONTAP is a unified storage device supporting both iSCSI and CIFS. In addition, ONTAP's snapshot provide the simplest, fastest, and most cost effective disk-to-disk backup solutions on the planet. Finally ONTAP has been deployed in environments that are far more demanding than my little home network will ever be. The odds that I will hit a bug in ONTAP is very, very, very low. The odds that I will ever lose data is non-existent.
So I did the following math:
Cost of goods for 8 disk 500 GB disk drives and the controller
+ Time to assemble hardware and software
+ Time to install, setup, troubleshoot and configure
+ Error rate of hardware
+ Lack of customer support
+ Online backups being full copies of the original data
= More money than buying 1 StoreVault S300 with 8x500 GB drives.
My only concern was that the S300 was not going to be that simple to set up. However, an hour after I unpacked the device I was serving data using CIFS.
Awesome!
