> I suggest you have a very good look at NetApp, too. Oracle has been > buying lots of NetApp storage and they have in the PETA(!) byte range of > NetApp now. Thet also do FC these days, but they're known as > marketleader in NAS (network attached storage, i.e. via Gig-Ethernet > which is a lot cheaper and a lot simpler than FC).
I would just offer a word of caution here. I used to be one of NetApp's biggest fans, we ran our entire Oracle Apps 11i on it for the last three years. Late last year we migrated to an EMC CX400 for various reasons and we haven't looked back, even with the more complex setup.
The NetApp was indeed a breeze to setup and administer compared to the EMC box, but once you started doing iSCSI and/or Fiber Channel it wasn't that much easier.
The main reason we migrated was because of performance. We didn't have Petabytes, we had 1TB, however, at the time of our purchase we bought the top of the line performer, an F840. It was never stellar, but was satisfactory for the early stages of our implmentation (it's performance on large writes was actually horrible). Still we bought it for ease of use and at a time when fiber channel on Linux was still questionable at best (think SuSE 7.0 Pro, SLES1, Linux kernel 2.2). We knew NFS would work and we thought later we would migrate to iSCSI which they were already pushing at the time (over 3 years ago) but still didn't have certification for Oracle on Linux even late last year (maybe still doesn't).
Well, as we have implemented more and more of the Oracle 11i Suite the performance really started to be a problem and we also wanted to start taking advantage of some of the snapmirror and snapvault features (we loved snapshots already). Netapp wanted nearly $100,000 for these features for our existing F840, a product that was three years old and is now closer to the bottom of their line.
When I asked why the cost was so high their statement was that their software is priced on the maximum storage capacity of the box (I think an F840 can have 12TB) even though we only had 1TB because we bought the box for it's performance characteristics, not it's maximum storage capacity. They said they would suggest a cluster of smaller boxes so that the cost would be lower but when I explained that our performance was already below where we would like, and that the smaller boxes were rated at about half the performance they basically said they didn't have an answer.
I was particularly interested in their newer FAS960 which had great performance and supported NAS, iSCSI, and fiber channel connectivity, but we still only needed a few terabytes while the system was capable of 24TB (or 48TB in a cluster) so we were back to paying a fortune for any features. They literally bragged about how their model was better than EMC because with EMC the features are priced based on your current amount of storage and you have to pay more if your storage grows. They couldn't understand that I wanted the performance of a high-end system but would never need 24TB of storage so they're model didn't make sense for me.
For the price they wanted for these two software features on my three year old, poor performing system (which wasn't even a redundant setup, you had to have a cluster for that, which did up the performace but also doubled your capacity and thus license and support costs) I was able to buy an EMC CX400 with 4.5TB of storage (1.5TB SCSI, 3TB ATA for archiving) plus all of the fiber channel swithes and adapters, and snapshot and mirroring software features. And the CX400 blows the F840 aways in performance (our Oracle database loads are about 4x faster), has fully redundant processors, and can be upgraded to a CX500 which is 50% faster and has even more capacity. It's more complicated, but not horribly so (with LVM, and the Navisphere GUI most things are almost as easy as NetApp, and everything is scriptable via the CLI agents for automation). Even the ATA storage on the CX400 (which was bought for archiving) blows the doors off our old Netapp fiber channel drives so much so that we've moved some of our development systems to it.
Basically, I loved NetApp and was a reference customer for Oracle on Linux on Netapp in a midsized CRM/ERP manufacturing environment, but their pricing model is way off base for those of us who have only moderate storage requirements but high performance requirements.
The systems Michael is talking about would not likely hit this issue because they are so large they are probably using (or at least have plans to use) the full storage capacity of the system, but I would say the bulk of us are not in that boat.
So the moral, I still think NetApp is great for ease of management, but if you want excellent peformance (especially write performance) but only have a moderate storage requirement (<6TB) then they are not the way to go unless they 've changed their pricing model in the last 6 months (I was very honest and open about why they lost us as a customer, even meeting with their upper sales and marketing folks to describe how they failed to address the needs of our midsized enviroment).
