Your comments on NDMP restores aren't the whole picture - you can allegedly restore them to something other than a Netapp: Solaris. The dump format is compatible with ufsrestore in Solaris. Admittedly I've never tried it, and I'd imagine that Windows ACLs would be dropped during the restore.
And thinking about it - there's nothing to stop Microsoft from applying this patent to wheedle cash from floppy manufacturers who ship pre-formatted floppy disks as well. OK - admittedly not that many people use floppys any more but there's nothing to stop Microsoft from trying. In fact it says on the page "Pricing for other device types can be negotiated with Microsoft"
One obvious course of action for "removable solid state media manufacturers" is simply to ship the device with no filesystem. Get the end user to format the device on first use and Presto! - that $0.25 per unit remains in the bank where it belongs.
Background: I work (indirectly) for a FTSE100 company in the UK. Last year I architected and deployed approximately 100 Linux desktops to a group of highly technical users, migrating them away from Sun Solaris. I've worked with most flavours of *nix over the last 10 years so regard myself as reasonably experienced systems administrator. Of course that's all relative:)
The technical stuff: Users were running on ageing Sun hardware with relatively low performance (Blade 1000s, Ultra 60s). The applications they run are technical applications for which ports exist for both Solaris and Linux. The new hardware is high-end HP workstations with more memory and processors than you can shake a stick at, combined with Nvidia FX3000/3400/3450 GFX cards. OS is RedHat 3.0. That was forced upon us by the key application which is only supported on that distribution.
Rationale behind the move: Move to Linux because the applications run faster. That's it.
So what worked well?
The major factor in the success of this rollout was the relatively low degree of change in terms of what was presented to the users. The applications they use were simply ports of the Solaris versions. Nothing new to learn. The only difference is that they work a whole bunch faster. Instantly the user base is won over and there's buy-in.
Another, seemingly small, item was the look of the login screen and the desktop environment on first login. First impressions do matter, and getting this right turned out to be very good PR. As the desktops were deployed, users would crowd round the first of the new systems in their areas and "kick its tyres". People were genuinely interested in what they were seeing, and a buzz spread round quickly. On our feedback forms many commented on how much they liked the new, tricked out, environment. In reality little had changed in terms of usability and people weren't frustrated that they couldn't find their favourite application (or analog, where none existed)
There was a relatively low impact for the support team too. Accustomed to Sun's jumpstart, kickstart is an intuitive and easy mechanism for deploying to a large number of identical desktops very easily. Power on, press F12, and the whole thing is automated from that point onwards.
What didn't work well?
The desktop environment was customised from the standard Redhat KDE login so that the right click menu displays a cascaded list of technical applications. Non-essential stuff was removed. Working out how the KDE menuing system hangs together wasted 2 days of my time. Redhat support were useless and I had to use a combination of strace and the source to prove definitively how it works. My major gripe with this whole process was the total lack of adequate documentation. If you're coming from a commercial Unix vendor's platform you'll be accustomed to good quality documentation that gives you all you need to deploy in a couple of hours. Just compare the CDE guides on docs.sun.com to the KDE manuals on www.kde.org and you will see what I mean. This is a fundamental weakness in the OSS world that must improve before large organisations will consider widescale deployments.
What else?
There was no desire or justification to migrate the backend office applications to the Linux desktop. Don't go there - it's a hiding to nothing. If the rest of your enterprise is using MS Office and Exchange there is no sense in trying to fudge things with OpenOffice or Evolution or their ilk. If you do, you *will* have problems. Somethings just don't work, and the support team don't want to spend the rest eternity trying to figure out why a particularly obtuse Word document with some recondite macro is refusing to display in OpenOffice. So how do those users get their standard office tools? Citrix. It just works. Leave the pain of MS support to the masochists and get on with your day job
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Your comments on NDMP restores aren't the whole picture - you can allegedly restore them to something other than a Netapp: Solaris. The dump format is compatible with ufsrestore in Solaris. Admittedly I've never tried it, and I'd imagine that Windows ACLs would be dropped during the restore.
If it's cheap, then Netapp might not qualify... :)
What about technologies - NAS? Host-attached? Gateway/NAS? Grids?
Other companies/products to consider:
EMC (The Celerra is a nice product)
Onstor Bobcat
HP
IBM
Hitachi
Panasas
Exanet
Yotta Yotta
StoreAge
If you want basic raid devices look at Infortrend/Transtec. Their S-ATA offerings now support RAID-6 and are dirt cheap.
One obvious course of action for "removable solid state media manufacturers" is simply to ship the device with no filesystem. Get the end user to format the device on first use and Presto! - that $0.25 per unit remains in the bank where it belongs.
The technical stuff: Users were running on ageing Sun hardware with relatively low performance (Blade 1000s, Ultra 60s). The applications they run are technical applications for which ports exist for both Solaris and Linux. The new hardware is high-end HP workstations with more memory and processors than you can shake a stick at, combined with Nvidia FX3000/3400/3450 GFX cards. OS is RedHat 3.0. That was forced upon us by the key application which is only supported on that distribution.
Rationale behind the move: Move to Linux because the applications run faster. That's it.
So what worked well?
The major factor in the success of this rollout was the relatively low degree of change in terms of what was presented to the users. The applications they use were simply ports of the Solaris versions. Nothing new to learn. The only difference is that they work a whole bunch faster. Instantly the user base is won over and there's buy-in.
Another, seemingly small, item was the look of the login screen and the desktop environment on first login. First impressions do matter, and getting this right turned out to be very good PR. As the desktops were deployed, users would crowd round the first of the new systems in their areas and "kick its tyres". People were genuinely interested in what they were seeing, and a buzz spread round quickly. On our feedback forms many commented on how much they liked the new, tricked out, environment. In reality little had changed in terms of usability and people weren't frustrated that they couldn't find their favourite application (or analog, where none existed)
There was a relatively low impact for the support team too. Accustomed to Sun's jumpstart, kickstart is an intuitive and easy mechanism for deploying to a large number of identical desktops very easily. Power on, press F12, and the whole thing is automated from that point onwards.
What didn't work well?
The desktop environment was customised from the standard Redhat KDE login so that the right click menu displays a cascaded list of technical applications. Non-essential stuff was removed. Working out how the KDE menuing system hangs together wasted 2 days of my time. Redhat support were useless and I had to use a combination of strace and the source to prove definitively how it works. My major gripe with this whole process was the total lack of adequate documentation. If you're coming from a commercial Unix vendor's platform you'll be accustomed to good quality documentation that gives you all you need to deploy in a couple of hours. Just compare the CDE guides on docs.sun.com to the KDE manuals on www.kde.org and you will see what I mean. This is a fundamental weakness in the OSS world that must improve before large organisations will consider widescale deployments.
What else?
There was no desire or justification to migrate the backend office applications to the Linux desktop. Don't go there - it's a hiding to nothing. If the rest of your enterprise is using MS Office and Exchange there is no sense in trying to fudge things with OpenOffice or Evolution or their ilk. If you do, you *will* have problems. Somethings just don't work, and the support team don't want to spend the rest eternity trying to figure out why a particularly obtuse Word document with some recondite macro is refusing to display in OpenOffice. So how do those users get their standard office tools? Citrix. It just works. Leave the pain of MS support to the masochists and get on with your day job