RE: Squid vs. NetCache

First: Please excuse the off topic contents of this message, but I have
to come to the defense of what I feel is a great company on this one..

We have an F540 with 100GB of disk have had nothing but praise for it.
It works as advertised. Period. It's fast, reliable, and works great for
our NFS/CIFS environment. It has never locked up on us, nor have we lost
poduction time because of disk failure.

Yours must be an isolated case. Everyone that I know who has one of
these systems, loves it, and the support group behind it.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Matthew Petach [SMTP:mattp@Internex.NET]
> Sent: Sunday, July 20, 1997 9:28 AM
> To: rho@Austria.EU.net
> Cc: robert@easynet.de; squid-users@nlanr.net
> Subject: 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
> --
> InterNex Information Services | Matthew Petach
> Network Engineering | mpetach@internex.net
> 2306 Walsh Avenue | Tel: (408) 327-2211
> Santa Clara, CA 95051 | Fax: (408) 496-5484
Received on Mon Jul 21 1997 - 12:10:44 MDT