Justin Krejci <jus at krytosvirus.com> wrote: > I am confused as to your reason for equating "enterprise" and > "windows" as if there are no enterprise supported NAS's that run > non-windows operating systems. I'm confused with this assertion. NetApp has their own OS called DataONTAP that has nothing to do with Windows OS. EMC's OS certainly isn't Windows, including the one that they run on their entry-level AX-4 product. If you're looking for a commercial NAS product, I would probably also throw in with NetApp. Their StoreVault product w/1TB disks will get you 12TB raw (up to about 9.5TB or so usable storage) for around $20-25k. That includes the NFS/CIFS/iSCSI, and I think FC interfaces. For the same price, you can buy an Aberdeen Linux or Windows based NAS device with 40TB raw storage split over two arrays. I bought two of these w/o the NAS OS's and will use them for backup servers. > As one example there is the Snap Server http://www.snapserver.com/ > which runs GuardianOS (Linux) > http://www.snapserver.com/Snap/en-US/products/sw/integrated/gos/ > > I have gotten real knee deep with the OS and (owner at the time) > Adaptec support to resolve some partitioning/RAID problems. They were > able to assist and bring about complete data recovery thanks to their > non-windows enterprise support. The support is optional. Was it non-Windows being the primary factor, or the fact that Adaptec makes a good OS-agnostic product? Hardware-based RAID certainly helps in recovery operations, but you won't get down to this level of hands-on if you buy something like NetApp or EMC. If something goes wrong, you call support and they send someone out. When someone says "Enterprise", I believe they generally imply a few catagorical features of a product: 1. Highly dependable hardware 2. Five-9's (99.999% uptime, 5 minutes unplanned downtime per year) 3. 24x7x365x4hr-onsite support It's all about risk management. So, what risk are you willing to take? Chad