I'm an FC SAN kind of guy and although we use NetApp 30xx filers for lots of non-essential storage I'm really no expert.
I have a new requirement for a very resilient (i.e. 3 or 4 '9s') basic static HTTP/S web server that will be shipping out large'ish (2-8GB) files from a directory/pool of around 16-20TB.
There will never be more than about 100 clients and there won't be more than 2-3Gbps of bandwidth between this filer/web-server and these clients so outright performance is not really any issue. My question is therefore, how trustworthy/resilient is a NetApp filer when used purely as a HTTP/S server?
Obviously if I ask NetApp they'll say they can give me the moon on a stick but I'm more interested in real sysadmin usage.
Thanks in advance, feel free to 'comment' me any questions.
Best Answer
While I do have a several NetApp filers unfortunately I don't have any real work experience with using them as http servers.
I certainly agree with Dan Carley in that there are good tools available for tuning\scaling etc with Apache and other mainstream http daemons. You could then NFS mount the shared volume of big files to a load balanced web server cluster.
But I also like kmarsh's option #2 to use the NetApp just for serving big files, that way you can have your choice of front end http daemon which can then serve dynamic pages etc. and the heavy lifting can be done by the NetApp.
From the limited playing around with the NetApp http service that I've done it's certainly not very full featured and seems like it's optimized for such tasks. I'd ask NetApp for some reference customers who you can call who are doing what you are talking about doing. I'm sure your not the first person to want to do this.