Posts by H.T.

I felt the biggest mistake Oracle made was restricting Solaris 11 to new hardware. It turns me off that I can’t test it out. We’re currently down to about 3 Sun systems (SFV440s) in addition to a lot of older Sun systems I keep running. Yes I actually have an old E220R running Big Brother just fine. Solaris has some really good things going for them, for example ZFS. I’ve no complaints with Oracle's migration of our support contracts or the costs. But from what I’m reading it seems Solaris is on its way out, which personally is something I’m sorry to see having worked on it for so many years.

NetApp, Run away, Run away fast

If you're thinking of purchasing NetApp save yourself a lot of time and trouble, don't. We migrated to NetApp six months ago, a pair of FAS3240s. The system has crashed twice in 6 months taking down most of our production servers.

Worst has been the appallingly pathetic response from NetApp support. I've worked with all the major UNIX vendors over the past 15 years and NetApp support is the absolute worst. NetApp support is just plain bad. We're not talking about a single experience or a single person, NetApp support has been consistently bad.

NetApp; Run from this Vendor.

We purchased a filer 6 months ago and have been running 8.01P5 in 7-mode. All I can say is if you're thinking about purchasing a NetApp system, don't, it's quicker and cheaper to just pound yourself in the head with a brick. It's been one problem after another. One weekend, a couple months after installation, the filer failed completely. No recent changes, no upgrade going on, nothing. It just crashed. And 3 or 4 times we've had email alerts that one of the two controllers had failed when hadn't (we're setup in an active/active or HA pair configuration) NetApp software that just doesn't work and support calls that stay open for weeks.

Their customer support seems intent on either proving you're setup is not a validated hardware/software configuration and if that fails they try to sell you professional services. In 12 years of working as a UNIX admin, their software support is the worst I've experience. This is based on working with numerous calls, not just one bad experience.