back to article PEAK NAS? Peak NAS. I reckon we've reached it

So it seems IBM has finally decided to stop reselling NetApp filers, and focus on its own products instead. I’m also waiting for the inevitable announcement that it will stop selling the rebadged Engenio products, as there is s fairly large crossover there. In fact there is more crossover between IBM's own Storwize range and …

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  1. petur
    WTF?

    Home NAS?

    I'm certainly advocating that everybody installs a NAS at home and creates his own private cloud. Great if you care about privacy and given the growing need in storage, you'll soon discover that stuffing everything in the cloud is a costly business, unless you accept archiving your pictures lowres (and you're stuck with your cloud provider, try moving all that data)

    1. Slap

      Re: Home NAS?

      I agree with you in principle, but I've never been a fan of true self contained NAS devices. Like many of you guys here I've got old and broken computers kicking around the place, and I tend to repurpose those as home servers for private cloud.

      True, doing that can up the amount of leccy that you use, but currently I run an old laptop with a busted screen as a home server with external drives for backup, and it doesn't seem to suck much more juice than a modern NAS system. Not to mention it can be far more more flexible as well - it even includes it's own UPS system, otherwise known as a battery.

    2. pompurin

      Re: Home NAS?

      I agree. With FreeNAS and ZFS you only need bog standard SATA connections. As it's mainly for archival purposes you don't need anything fast, 5400 to 7200 rpm is good enough for most.

      With the amount of money you would spend on creating a bespoke NAS you may as well save it by re-using an old PC and just filling it up with a few hard disks and booting up FreeNAS from a USB stick.

      The interface for FreeNAS is fairly intuitive. It's only when you look into the features of compression, deduplication and snapshot that it gets interesting.

  2. phil dude
    Coat

    take an upvote...

    we could all do with 1Gb/s home internet so we could share with other home users.

    Just saying...

    P.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I'd think the biggest opportunity for Netapp right now would be archiving... something that intelligently stubs files according to a policy and puts them on media that isn't backed up like active data. They're in the perfect place to do it, and this is something that can help enterprises cut the bottom off their iceberg of unstructured data. Even if we replaced our Netapp with something that was a tenth the price, we still need to back it up, and that's not a cost that a whitebox or all-flash gizmo is going to change.

    1. Lusty

      "something that intelligently stubs files according to a policy and puts them on media that isn't backed up like active data"

      Not used NetApp much then? This actively works against their best practices of using humungous BSAS drives for primary storage and simply keeping the backups online. It would also break their integration with VSS horribly in NAS scenarios, and that's one of their customers favourite features! The only media I can think of that would be cheaper than 4TB BSAS (SATA) is tape, and tape only works out cheaper if you have a F&*^ ton of data to offload, like the good folks at CERN, or people taking pictures of the whole planet for instance. For almost everyone else big cheap disk now works out cheaper in the long run as well as offering a better feature list. NetApp can even make your disks into WORM if you like, although I hear that often ends in tears because admins refuse to read the manual and end up locking the drives for eternity :)

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Ahhh yes but that would be Netapp's own best practice (not something industry wide) allowing them to sell as much enterprise disk as possible to their Customers. Rather than simply suggesting they put the cold data somewhere more appropriate i.e off Netapp.

        1. Lusty

          Where would you suggest is more appropriate than massive cheap drives? NetApp customers tend to be the types who don't want legacy tape systems about the place...

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