Hi, just wanted to add to this thread as some comments are not entirely factual.
Negatives:
- Managment for the file shares moves from Windows administrators to your storage administrators.
Not at all, once your Storage Admin has created the volume and CIFS share and permission'ed it correctly, your Windows Administrators can continue to administer the share as per normal procedure, adding removing users/groups or administering through Active Directory. The only time the storage admin needs to be involved is if a volume change or possible root permissions change maybe required for example.
Security management becomes an issue. We have trust relationships about 10 other domains. Managing the security was not as easy as from a Windows server with experience Windows Server security engineers.
Again not factually true. The NetApp appliance will reference Active Directory and a domain controller if it is joined to a domain as part of the CIFS setup. As long as the appliance can communicate with the DC and DNS and perform lookups AND your Active Directory domains have a 2 way Trust relationship within the AD forest, then a user authenticating again one domain will be able to access a resource in another domain.
- Window's Shadow Copy Service is an amazing feature that allows for end user self-service restores. You would lose this ability with NetApp CIFS.
Windows Shadow copy is one option, however NetApp has snapshot technology, which allows for the creation of 255 "snapshots" of a each individual volume and quite frankly is far superior. There are many advantages to this technology than I can describe when compared with competitors. From memory there are no other Vendors in the market that offer in the region of 255 snapshots. Using Snapshot technology with your CIFS share, will, subject to the size of the working Data Set, allow you to keep on disk, 255 snapshots of the data. With the correct setup of the CIFS Shares, snapshots and AD permissions, users will be able to restore a previous version of a file or folder, by using a previous versions tab available in the properties of a file or folder held in the CIFS Share. The user would be able to restore their own data, at will. You do not loose this ability with NetApp CIFS Shares.
- We use traditional Windows agent based tape backup. There were questions on how we would continue to use this method with the NetApp CIFS.
Windows based backup with traditional systems, again is not an issue. If the appliance is joined to the windows domain, it has a computer account in active directory and is treated as any other CIFS/File server, just a big one.
Most traditional backup software available these days allows for backups of a CIFS share/File Server and would treat the appliance in the same way. Again this would not be a issue, if you wanted to use this method.
Other Benefits for an appliance would be:
Reduced hardware maintenance and support, as you may be able to remove several file servers from hardware/maintenance contracts.
Small reduction in power and cooling utilization.
Fewer windows server licenses.
Centralized CIFS/File storage (This can be seen as a benefit as well as a problem).
Ability to provide up to 255 restore points, which could be online
Fewer restores from tape (potentially)
Ability to replicate this data using Snapmirror, which Windows cannot do as easily.
Deduplication function available with NetApp - removing duplicate data block to save on overall storage.
- Most importantly - Being able to add additional storage, on the fly, without downtime, to cope with an increase in a file storage/growth.
Hope this Helps.
Martin
