NetApps (was Re: [OpenAFS] SAMBA as a CIFS <-> AFS gateway)

[Thomas Vincent - 409-974-3678]

If anyone would ever do a NetApp setup with AFS they could make a lot of
money. If you have ever been through a Network Appliance sales
presentation, it is pretty good. The only problem is they neglect to
mention the inherent security flaws of NFS.

Cheers,
Thomas Vincent
Apple IS&T

On Tue, 17 Apr 2001, James Graves wrote:

>
> I can certainly understand the desire to re-use the NetApp somehow.
> They have a lot of great features for their niche (raw file serving),
> and they are _very_ expensive.  But, using it over NFS as the underlying
> storage for an AFS fileserver is just asking for trouble.
>
> Instead, the disks could be moved to a regular computer.  If it's an
> older NetApp (like in the 500 series) then the SCSI drives are fairly
> standard.  Ditto for the FC-AL storage shelves on the 700 series.  I
> haven't tried this, but you _should_ be able to just plug them in and
> go.  You won't get the shelf management stuff (failed drive warning,
> failed power supply waring, etc.), which is a bummer.
>
> You could still use it as storage for something else.  The NetApp
> website has some interesting papers on stuff like using a filer as
> database storage.  This sounds crazy, but the RAID4 + WAFL often has
> better throughput than an OS's own local disk.  This is because of the
> missmatch between RAID5 and most OS's filesystems (ffs, ext2, etc.).
>
> Good luck,
>
> James Graves
>
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