I was recently discussing load balancers with someone. I said I was much happier with F5 than I was with Cisco and he countered that although he preferred F5 head to head, going with Cisco for all the network was better for them in the long run.
The situation with storage is similar. EMC makes a great SAN but a pretty bad NAS. Is it worth getting EMC's NAS for the One Stop Shop factor?
As I originally blogged, I was hoping to use EMC snapshots to perform server-less/network-less backups. EMC provides two main tools for managing snapshots in this type of situation:
The PowerSnap Module supposedly automates taking snapshots for the purpose of backups, while Replication Manager supposedly provides a much more robust package.
With Replication Manager you might create a policy to take a snapshot every five minutes, keep the last 10, and use those for backups whenever necessary.
To make a long story short, Replication Manager is useless for LUNs with ZFS. According to EMC, this won't change in the near future. PowerSnap also has no support for taking snapshots of LUNs with ZFS on them so basically EMC has no server-less backup offerings for Solaris with ZFS.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a SAN storage expert but I have spent a lot of time looking into SAN storage systems from the business side and I thought I'd share some of my conclusions.
It seems that the proverbial question is how to balance the performance, cost, usable space, and availability of a storage solution. Any DBA will ask you to give him RAID 10 on small fast disks. Anyone paying the bills will ask "Why can't I use half the disks I bought?"