Hi,

Just wanted to add my concerns as a Storevault partner.  I really hope that they don't hault/EOL the S550 line.  Netapp must support Windows 2008.  When the Storevault product came out, I thought that "Netapp" understood the market they were going after and I got on board with them.

I took every course and read everything I could to get ahead of the curve when the Storevault line took off.

Right now I've got this awful feeling in my stomach.....

I really, really hope that Netapp steps up and does the right thing....

If there is anything we can do as group, please count me in.......

Genito

I had an Inside Sales Rep call me yesterday to "check in" on me. I relayed all our concerns and how disappointed we all are. I'm like all of you: I bought this StoreVault because of the NetApp name...which will mean nothingto me if they drop us. He said "I hear you" and is checking on what the options are for moving forward. We'll see what happens. As of now, I'm very skeptical.

Frank,

Thanks, that's at least a start, but we would really like to see SnapDrive 6.0 and SnapManager for Exchange 5.0 make it over to S550. It seems like this would not be too hard: just issue NetApp license keys for SME going forward. Once licensed, the download would be available from NOW and S9/S10 already support NetApp licenses.

The upgrades already exist for FAS, so it's really just a licensing/distribution issue to make them available to S-family customers. If we won't have access to the latest software, what's the point of renewing the software maintenance contracts?

Hi,

Please count me in, I am just bought an S550 in November and I am really ticked off as basically my choices for futureproofing are to upgrade.........

I'm getting a hold of my rep.....

Whatever help/assistance you need count me in....

We have clients with fully loaded systems that they paid big bucks and what am I going to tell them:

1. The Storevault company went back to the parent Netapp
2. They discontinued the S300 line
3. They discontinued the S500 line
4. The brought out the S550 to replace
5. They are EOL the S550
6. You have to stay on Windows 2003 cause Netapp wants you to upgrade your system to go to Windows 2008
7. Pay to buy new SAN hardware
8. Pay consulting to move your data to new SAN hardware

I can safely say that my clients will be pissed and will not upgrade to new NetApp hardware cause their [NetApp] credibility is shot and they [clients] have no guarantee that NetApp would not do the same thing.

Netapp support and update the product line S55X until they EOL the hardware side of things.

I can't believe in today's economy that NetApp would risk business...

This is completely unacceptable and something must be done.......

Let me know however I can help.

Genito

I was able to meet with my Acount Executive, Mike Howard, and his System Engineer, Reggie Allen, and they

answered all my question that I had about the end of life for the S-Family.

* We can buy new 3 year contracts now if we want support until 2012

* There will be no more OnTap releases for S-Family

* There will be no new features

* They will fix bugs (not sure how they will do that without an OnTap release)

* There is a trade up program for S-Family, the quicker you take advantage of it the better the discount will be

I told them that is it totally unacceptable that they do not support Windows 2008 domains and StoreVault Manager running on Vista.  Its the year 2009 for crying out loud.  They told me they will report my feedback but I don't think it will change anything.  They will need to make the FAS2000 series available at a HUGE discount for me to consider doing a business with a company that has so betrayed me.

I was doing some research when I came across this post.

Unbelievable!  We just invested a large stake of our virtual environment in 2 S550's and now we are scratching our heads on what to do next.  I have sent out an e-mail to our reseller on what their version of this story will be.  I'll stay tuned.

We donated closers to $45K for two S500 about a year and a half ago.  Our NetApp rep just offered to let us spend another $50K for two FAS2020's Just so we can use win2k8 domains.

Same here, we've invested (or now it seems thrown cash away) in S500 and S550 units.  The lack of support for Windows 2008 is unbelievable, and a major inssue now that we're looking into virtualizing our server infrastructure.  I feel very let down by this level of service.

I have a 1 year old S500 and just found this thread.

My organisation and other merged, and now I've been forced onto a native 2008 domain.  Am I understanding correctly by reading this, that my 1year old $15,000 storage array is now useless?  Am I able to adleast run iSCSI on a 2008 server with local storevault authentication?

Your only option is to beat/beg/plead/negotiate with your NetApp sales about good pricing for a 2020 single head system. I have heard of some very aggressive pricing.... (may depend on the sales rep though)

The 2020 is a nice little box...you pick up dedup which the S Series didn't have.

I would love to know this answer too. I would guess that it would work fine since you already have 1 DC on 2008 and it's working fine as long as you keep the domain and forest levels down. However, even if this works, what would we be missing in 2008 functionality by leaving the functional level down?

That's a good page. I just found another good one...

http://www.petri.co.il/understanding-windows-server-2008-active-directory-domain-and-forest-functional-levels.htm

It says there are no additional features when raising the forest functional level, only the domain functional level.

I did not hear that it will provide Windows 2008 support, but I did hear that there was an update that was currently being worked on.  The person I talked to did not have an ETA of when it would be released and he suspected it was only bug fixes and no new features.  Oh how I hope you're right!

I completely agree.

Has anyone yet tried Windows Server 2008 with their s500?  I'd prefer not to simply use it as an iSCSI array.

Being supported verusus is actually working are two different things of course.

Maybe it does work with AD just fine?

Just curious if anyone has done it yet.  Still haven't heard about a new version of on-tap for 2008 from our rep.

Thanks,

-doug

Thanks for the reply.  I took have the s500 in a 2003 domain, and it was the 2008 domain with CIFS that I was wondering about.  Did you mean 2008 on that first line?

So, did you get an error when trying the 2008 domain natively or since it's not supported you decided not to go native.  It sounds like 2008 as an AD in a 2003 ad backbone/forest is fine.

Thanks,

-doug

Yes.

I'm using Xen Server (4.1 and the free 5.0 version) and love it.  It does have built in support for netapp products for storage, but this basically lets me attach a vm to it for iscsi storage.

In this way, I could go to a native 2008 AD and use the s500 as storage for it.  It defeats the purpose of the SV in general, but unfortunately we won't be upgrading to a NetApp product anytime soon and are one of the unlucky customers who invested in two of these things in 2008 with the idea of migrating to 2008.

Thanks,

-Doug

It also will make a rock-solid iSCSI target forever (given that the iSCSI spec is pretty solid) so not bad for raw space but backed by RAID DP/WAFL/disk scrubs/etc.