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Originally Posted by Terry Kennedy
What you should realize is that the SnapOS-based servers are considered "legacy" products - after all, these date all the way back to Meridian Data (that's 3 owners of the Snap product line ago). Even the 4100 is a 5-year-old+ design at this point.
They were never intended to be field-upgradable. They were targeted at companies who would install it and forget about it. The fact that end users have figured out ways to expand the units and make them do new tricks is a tribute to the flexibility of the original design.
Comparing a 5- (or more) year-old design to a current product isn't really a fair comparison. Likewise, comapring any Adaptec product to an intentionally-open product isn't fair either - they're competing in very different market spaces.
I haven't looked at any of the GuardianOS-based Snap units, so I can't say if they are better performers (though I'd expect they are, simply because they're newer designs). I did look at some of Adaptec's offerings before I built my own servers from scratch, but the minute I saw they required special Adaptec drives (available in a limited number of sizes and at very high prices) I stopped looking.
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I've kinda wandered away from the SnapOS units for the time being. I have one of the old Guardian 4400s (still says Quantum on the front) and it does seem to out perform the SnapOS units. My Guardian is running four 120GB drives in a RAID 5 with GuardianOS 3.1 on a half gig of RAM. I have a 4100 (Dell PowerVault 705N) that's running OS 3.7.8xx and also four 120s in a RAID 5. A RAM upgrade would probably help performance a bit but from what I've seen so far, the Guardian 4400 out performs the 4100 by almost 50%. The newer design definitely helps. It also helps that it comes with a dual head gigabit Ethernet adapter. While it's not hooked up to a gigabit network the performance is still nice.
Then again it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. The 4400 runs off of a PIII 1GHz processor, 256-512MB PC100 SDRAM, and has dual gigabit Ethernet capabilities. The 4100
I think (not swearing to this) a PII 233MHz processor, 64-128MB RAM and 100Base-TX Ethernet adapter. There are at least two major shifts in technology between the two and the 4400 is a discontinued product! It's already been replaced by the 4200 and 4500 which have if memory serves a P4 1.4 GHz and 512-1GB of ?DDR? RAM. Again, there's another one or two shifts in technology.
You're also right in that making these older SnapOS units do neat tricks (field upgrades with new and more drives than the original spec) is pretty nice, you can only get them to do so much. Eventually (if it hasn't happened already) the servers on today's market will leave even the modified Snap servers in the dust just because of advances in technology.
I have a feeling (and I might be completely wrong so don't shoot me just yet) that these little departmental SnapOS servers are dying a slow death to faster, larger, cheaper, and possibly more open storage solutions. They're a great idea but are being out paced by technology.
INT 20h