Re: The limitations you mention are either not there or rapidly going away
Hi Dimutris,
I have been a Netapp user, 7 mode, for many years and in my quest to move to Clustered ONTAP (I have an 8060 HA system) I was given a data migration quote for my entire environment for file and my luns. This happened less than a month ago. I was also told that a netapp transition team will have to be engaged. So for whom is the free? It wasn't for me.
Did you know that your largest competitor, EMC, migrated their xtremeio customers for free? If you're going cause me pain you need to eat the cost. I'm sure you know this, but data migration is not a fun exercise for distributed environments like ours and let me tell you something else. I have 23 systems in remote locations replicating centrally a lot of critical data, where do I start without losing the ability to replicate? Do you see my pain here? Capex pain, and operational pain.
I'm using netapp already Dimitris and have seen the GUI. Do I have per LUN stats, per flexvol stats, cache hits etc? Where is that located in the native GUI? We're running 8.3 on our 8060.
The Exchange problem is not a microsoft limitation. Per netapp support It is a problem between the netapp VSS provider and the vmware one. SQL Server is using a different backup method via the virtual disk interface.
Ontap is surely flexible but it is also very complex with subpar management tools. One can make the argument there are worse things I could be managing, however, I have made the choice to use netapp, for 11 years and things have gotten worse from a management viewpoint while the product complexity has increased exponentially with clustered ontap.
You are right netapp hasn't caused many migrations over the last 20 years. Trad to Flex, 7 mode to Clustered Ontap. That's certainly a better record that a few others.
That said, I can't convert my existing 8060 which already runs Clustered Ontap to a Clustered Ontap Metrocluster without data migration can I? I was told I couldn't do it because it would require yet another data migration. Don't really understand the reasoning, however, I don't really care. We just don't like to deal with migrations. I'm sure I'm not alone.
Have I told you how much I hate perfstat? I think I've mentioned it before somewhere in this thread. I hate perfstat! It's 2015, an intelligent storage system should make it easy on the administrator to access performance data. In fact, it should analyze that data itself. You should not be asking your customers to run perfstat. It kinda defeats the purpose of sending autosupports.
Some of us are getting tired guys. Really, really tired...
Cheers