My experience has been this: if you need a task done that can be well defined, and has a short lifespan, say 0-3months, a contractor can be good. Examples might be writing tools that are "grunt work" or doing admin work for machines that are "hanging on" until your next project completes.
In one position, I had a number of contractors work on development and deployment of a mail/web platform to support 25k customers. While they did reasonable work, what we defined and what they built didn't really jive in the end, mainly because they didn't come with the long term experience with our customers. Certain flawed systems, most notably NIS+ were used that later proved to be problematic, after many of the contractors were working elsewhere.
My advice is to find good people who share your vision and have the proper skill set who you can keep long term. This won't be easy, especially in an environment like the valley, but its better for you and your customers, and will almost certainly cost less. Don't forget that you can get an employee who has 75% of what you want, who will cost less than a contractor, and who can learn the other 25% as things progress. Employees can be put on-call... most contractors will balk at this.;)
As for all the good people being contractors.. I dispute that. Those contractors don't get good options in startups as a general rule. They may get more $/hour, but in the end the employees who stick it out tend to cash in way more.
Netapps have prove to be very reliable in my experience -- I've used a few of their filers at an ISP -- grinding 24x7 for web, mail, shell, etc.
That said, I wouldn't necessarily recommend them for this application. NFS does *NOT* scale for most applications. It's great for distributing low-to-medium workloads, but I'd question the ability of the box to perform for such a large data set. (mpg streams) One of the major benefits of NetApps is the internal caching, which works very well for read-intensive applications. In some benchmarks, and occasionally in real life, I've seen data return from a netapp faster than from local 7200 rpm disks. However, with multi gigabyte streams, the cache will be worthless.
My only personal experience with FC-AL has been with Sun E4500's and MTI Raids.. similar to EMC, I'd imagine. They work well, and using Veritas products you can do high-availablilty and easy data relocation.. something to think about long term. (i.e. the cost for a mid-range quad proc AXmp, ~$35-45k could be offset in the future when you need to scale..)
I guess to summarize: for workloads like web serving, Netapps work great. For email, locking presents issues -- its not bad with Solaris, but its a joke in linux. For the initial application of large mpeg streams, I'd go with an FC-AL raid array, using dual loops on dual fail-over hosts. If availability isnt an issue, then 1 host, 1 loop. (And if performance is much more important than cost, use switched Fibre Channel)
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My experience has been this: if you need a task done that can be well defined, and has a short lifespan, say 0-3months, a contractor can be good. Examples might be writing tools that are "grunt work" or doing admin work for machines that are "hanging on" until your next project completes.
;)
In one position, I had a number of contractors work on development and deployment of a mail/web platform to support 25k customers. While they did reasonable work, what we defined and what they built didn't really jive in the end, mainly because they didn't come with the long term experience with our customers. Certain flawed systems, most notably NIS+ were used that later proved to be problematic, after many of the contractors were working elsewhere.
My advice is to find good people who share your vision and have the proper skill set who you can keep long term. This won't be easy, especially in an environment like the valley, but its better for you and your customers, and will almost certainly cost less. Don't forget that you can get an employee who has 75% of what you want, who will cost less than a contractor, and who can learn the other 25% as things progress. Employees can be put on-call... most contractors will balk at this.
As for all the good people being contractors.. I dispute that. Those contractors don't get good options in startups as a general rule. They may get more $/hour, but in the end the employees who stick it out tend to cash in way more.
-lynch
Netapps have prove to be very reliable in my experience -- I've used a few of their filers at an ISP -- grinding 24x7 for web, mail, shell, etc.
That said, I wouldn't necessarily recommend them for this application. NFS does *NOT* scale for most applications. It's great for distributing low-to-medium workloads, but I'd question the ability of the box to perform for such a large data set. (mpg streams) One of the major benefits of NetApps is the internal caching, which works very well for read-intensive applications. In some benchmarks, and occasionally in real life, I've seen data return from a netapp faster than from local 7200 rpm disks. However, with multi gigabyte streams, the cache will be worthless.
My only personal experience with FC-AL has been with Sun E4500's and MTI Raids.. similar to EMC, I'd imagine. They work well, and using Veritas products you can do high-availablilty and easy data relocation.. something to think about long term. (i.e. the cost for a mid-range quad proc AXmp, ~$35-45k could be offset in the future when you need to scale..)
I guess to summarize: for workloads like web serving, Netapps work great. For email, locking presents issues -- its not bad with Solaris, but its a joke in linux. For the initial application of large mpeg streams, I'd go with an FC-AL raid array, using dual loops on dual fail-over hosts. If availability isnt an issue, then 1 host, 1 loop. (And if performance is much more important than cost, use switched Fibre Channel)
-lynch