By Greg Whynott -
When I say blow the socks off the blue arc, this is an understatement. the load on the nexenta is 3X over what would cause a BOSSOCK depletion in the blue arc and bring the studio to its knees. This is on a volume with LESS physical disks than the blue arc. All network threwput and IOPS charts are in areas that we never seen with our dual BA cluster combined!
It'll take on any HDS or EMC lover!
No numbers yet but just a quick update, since moving our file systems over to the Nexenta from Blue Arc, artists are in their glory. Getting kdo's from many. The blue arc would fall over every time we submitted a big job but now things are going threw I am told 5X quicker. They are sending in 5 jobs at a time instead of 1/2 a job too, whatever 1/2 a job is.... I just smile and say 'nice!`.
We had some hurdles to get over which ultimately made our environment 'better' but we are good now. Anyone considering using Nexenta in a mixed environment, do yourself a favor and step up to NFSv4 if you haven't already, if you are in a mixed environment and rely on ACLs quite a bit it'll be mandatory. in a week or so I'll write up a large email (or maybe I should start a blog!) and go into the challenges, thoughts on support and the entire picture. Over all the message will be I think you are wasting your money on any of the incumbent propitiatory storage vendors these days, for most M&E storage requirements. Unless they re-do pricing you are just buying your friendly and always smiling sales guy who takes you out for a few lunches he expenses his next Benz or cottage on the lake.
take care,
-g