NetApp filers (was Re: [SunRescue] Tape drive)

[Stephen Dowdy]

Bill neglected to mention what i consider the prime reason for having
a NetAPP, and that is Copy-On-Write (COW) SNAPSHOTs.

Suppose you delete a file 'foo', you simply:

	% cp .snapshot/hourly.0/foo .
	(.snapshot is a hidden directory only seen on access)

You can specify schedules of snapshots (hourly,weekly,monthly,yearly) to
retain.

For a small shop, or house, this may not mean as much, but when you have
hundreds of students doing stupid things, it's much nicer to tell them
how to get their own files back, rather than having to spool up tapes
to fix the problem.

Also, as Bill mentioned, the NetApp boxes are extremely reliable.  CU
CompSci has been using them for at least 6 years and had only a couple
failures on a single box caused by simultaneous disk and NVRAM cache
failure (bad power hit)

--stephen
--
Stephen Dowdy - Systems Administrator - CS Dept - Univ of Colorado at Boulder
dowdy at cs.colorado.edu  --  http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~dowdy/signature.html