[rescue] The aesthetics of rescue

[vraptor at employees.org]

On Wed, 2 Oct 2002, Joshua D Boyd wrote:

>On Wed, Oct 02, 2002 at 10:23:29AM -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:
>
>>   You're absolutely right...I'm talking about "real" Auspex servers,
>> not their great big PCs running NT with crappy software.
>>
>>   But then again, I haven't taken NetApp seriously since they went back
>> to PCs from real hardware either.
>
>Well, at least the rest of the hardware sounds decent except for the
>P4s.  And everyone raves about the software, which is NOT windows NT
>based (or so we are led to believe.

It's more of a subset of Unix, although the filesystem is WAFL.

I had the opportunity to use both older Auspexi (ss20 based, with
SunOS), and the NetApps from F330-F760.  The problem I had with
the Auspex (I didn't "own" the machine, just was forced to deal
with it when on-call), was it's overcomplication.  From what I
could see, if you didn't set them up "right" at the beginning,
they were very hard to "fix" to get them right.  Also, backing
them up created difficulties--this may have been a limitation
of this particular model, but I was at the beginning of my
sys admining career, so don't know the details.

NetApps on the other hand, are so simple, even an NT guy has trouble
setting them up wrong (ok, a *smart* NT guy ;-). And, if you don't get
it right the first time, it's just a matter of throwing a little extra
disk space on them for migration, and fixing it.  My favorite thing
about NetApps are the 5-min. emergency upgrades during the lunch hour.

I can't recall ever losing any data from a NetApp, either.  I can't
recall losing data from BayDels or even nStor's GigaRAIDs.  But I
know we lost data from the Auspex--damned Micropolis 1911 debacle.
And don't even get me started about the idiots in my sysadmin team
who used slice 2 under Online Disk Suite and lost data (and then
argued that it wasn't the problem).

Oops, almost fell into ranting mode. :-)

=Nadine=