On Tue, Oct 27 at 18:58, Bryan Cantrill wrote:
Why would we do this? I'm all for zero-cost endeavors, but this isn't zero-cost -- and I'm having a hard time seeing the business case here, especially when we have so many paying customers for whom the business case for our time and energy is crystal clear...- Bryan
I don't have a need for a large 7110 box, my group's file serving needs are quite small. I decided on a Dell T610 running OpenSolaris, with half the drives populated now and half to be populated as we get close to filling them up. Pair of mirrored vdevs for performance, with an SSD cache. I'd have loved to have, instead, the nice fishworks gui interface to the whole thing, and if that existed on something like an X2270, that's what we would have bought instead of the Dell box. Ultimately, I wanted the simplicity of a Drobo, capable of saturating a Gig-E port or two, in an easy to maintain and administer system. One and a half out of three ain't bad, but Fishworks GUI on a 4-disk X2270 would have been a 3 for 3 solution I believe. We just can't afford to spend $8-10k to "try" a 7110 which is likely complete overkill for our needs, and we have no expectation of our business growing into it within the next two years. $2k was our absolute ceiling for a trial purchase, and I knew that if my OpenSolaris experiment didn't work out, I could just repurpose the Dell box with Debian, EXT3, software RAID and Samba and get a 75-80% solution. Yes, this may not make business sense for Sun-as-structured, but someone will figure out how to scratch that itch because it's real for a LOT of small businesses. They want that low cost entry into a business-grade NAS without having to build it themselves, something that's a step up from a whitebox 2-disk mirror from some no-name vendor who won't exist in 6 months. --eric PS: Not having enough engineers to support a growing and paying customer base is a *good* problem to have. The opposite is much, much worse. -- Eric D. Mudama edmud...@mail.bounceswoosh.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
