Anyone using Onstor Bobcat series appliance for NAS?

Any feedback on this product? We are considering using them along with
NexSan storage arrays to build NAS. Looks to be a cheaper alternative
to NetApp nearline products. Anyone using them in production?
TIA
-G

Sto Rage© wrote:
Any feedback on this product? We are considering using them along with
NexSan storage arrays to build NAS. Looks to be a cheaper alternative
to NetApp nearline products. Anyone using them in production?

We brought in a couple for evaluation and although we didn't purchase
them, I really did like the products and the company is great to deal
with. The primary reason we didn't purchase them was due to the 8k
blocksize that was hard-coded into the Bobcats. We were looking to
migrate from a Windows-based file cluster with 4K blocksizes and our
average file size happened to be 11K, meaning a large jump in required
storage for the same amount of data. ONstor was going to change that
but I haven't heard if they ever did.

Overall, the Bobcats performed very well for us and I suspect that one
of these years we'll look at them again. Comparing themn to a NetApp
nearline isn't exactly fair though - the Bobcats don't have any disk
associated with them so a more fair comparison might be a replacement
for a Windows cluster.

.../Ed