Techno Musings

I ‘ve been reviewing Symantec’s new FileStore and their soon to be released S4 offerings. There are quite a few resources available on FileStore from their slides on the Internet to their product page.  Firstly I want to welcome them to the clustered NAS business much like HP is there already with EXDS, their Polyserve appliance.  However it seems to me that Symantec like Oracle.SUN and Hitachi has joint the greater than 200TB file system club.  HNAS with WFS2 can support a file system size of 256TB and Oracle.SUN.  (Note NetApp, EMC and HP do not offer products with filesystems of this size.  Although NetApp will most likely debate that point with their Clustered Namespace available with Ontap V8 in GX mode.)

Since there is not a lot of clarity on S4 I’ll skip it until we can see something with some “real meat on the bones” to analyze.  With respect to FileStore I do have some questions which I would like to find out the answer to:

1. In the slide materials from Symantec there is mention of NFS Spec performance (SFS2008) however the y-axis has no numbers on it, but Symantec claims near linear scalability of performance up to 16 nodes and that they will be faster than the fastest number from NetApp.   My question is where are the draft numbers and why did the presentation even include a performance graph if they weren’t ready yet?
2. FileStore is a soft appliance and as such runs on any backend storage including SAN attached.  To me this is a validation of the approach which Hitachi has taken, and in some cases we offer RAIN as well as SAIN modes of operation.  The question that I have is largely related to price here.  The quotes in the press are that for just under $7k USD you can purchase a node pair.  Does that include Storage, nodes, etc.?  Is there a per capacity license, etc.?
3. Embedded DLM/ILM or data migration policies are something else which are a part of FileStore (SSD to SAS/FC to SATA).  Just like HNAS these features are baked right into the NAS software.  One point of differentiation between the two products appears to be the fact that HNAS can target external file/object storage systems such as the Essential NAS Platform as well as HCAP.  So no question here just merely an observation.

So I warmly welcome Symantec to the clustered/scalable NAS business and cannot wait to see how we compete in the market.