Re: Squid vs. NetCache

Recently, Robert Barta talked about "Re: Squid vs. NetCache", and said
>
> >>>Robert Kiessling said:
> --> Network Appliance claims that their NetCache is superior to Squid in
> --> that it is more reliable, faster, has a better user interface and more
> --> built-in statistics, fully supports HTTP/1.1, and includes all of
> --> Squid's features (maybe I forgot some arguments). And it also runs
> --> under NT, but that's nothing I'd need.
>
> Actually, they are offering two things:
>
> - NetCache, Peter Danzig's commercialized version. We have it in
> operation as accelerator for a medium busy server without any real
> problems. I guess, it is not suffering from featuritis like Squid
> sometime tends to.
>
> - A rather optimized NFS hardware
>
> The figures they purport are quite impressive. Outperforms a standard
> file system by a magnitude. Hotswap, RAID, snapshot horizons for
> backups and a "spacy" design of the chassis included. :-)
>
> Impressive also is it's price per GB.....but it might pay off if you
> consider bandwith costs here on the continent.

I would not purchase an NFS server from Network Appliances if I were
you. We made the mistake of buying one of their F540 boxes with
50GB of disk for approx $70K US. It has locked up so many times
this past week, we are regretting moving away from a sparc 20
with DiskSuite as a fileserver. They are overpriced, unreliable,
their support is non-existent. In short, they are one of the
worst investments you could possibly consider making. I will
agree that when the box is up and running, the performance
numbers are impressive as all hell...but balancing that against
having the box lock up 15 times a night (and when I say lock
up, I mean the box no longer responds to anything on the console,
you have to UNPLUG all the disks while they're spinning, and power
off the main controller, wait 30 seconds, and power it back on
again.) tends to make its numbers considerably less impressive.
 
> Finally, they announced that a proxy will run native on this NFS thingy.

True--but are you going to want your proxy to run on a box that
needs to be power cycled 15 times per night?
 
> --> I would be interested in real-live experience about NetCache. Does it
> --> really behave that much better as they want to make us believe? What
> --> are the drawbacks (other than not having the source code)?
>
> They offer test installations.
>
> Anyway, optimal performance is not the only strategical issue. Having
> access to the source *is* important. If you are under a spam attack
> you cannot wait until your software manufacturer reacts.

Another very good reason to stick with squid... :-)
 
> \rho
>

Matt

-- 
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