The netapps storevault appliance for network storage seemed to good to be true. A feature rich network storage applciance with the bells and whistles of pricier and comparable SANs on the market.
It might have been to true. The Netapps storevault was purchased and targedted for the small to mediium business market. Not that cheap as it still cost 10 thousand and up for a half loaded appliance touting several terrabytes of hard disk space. The SAN could provide AD integrated for security shares and iSCSI functionality that can eassily be used with Microsoft Windows Servers with the iSCSI initiator. For the most part this all worked well. I saw in the early stages of deployment the lack of email notifications of events going on on the device. This turned out to be even moore important and a feature well missed as deployed storevaults began to "freeze" and "hicup" with now apparent reason. This caused work flow disruption. The only sure at the time was to retsrat the unit. Alas during the day this would mean that all work stopped if the deployment included windows networking shares. If the iSCSI initiator was used for let's say, exchange data Stores, then email flow would also stop.
Bad, bad, this is not a good thing and although there a hefty amount of features and the price is inviting, look for something more reliable for you network storage needs.

NetApps Storevault S550's reliability

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