one can buy a single box from Coraid for about the same price, use commodity SATA drives, and get 7TB out of it (more as the drive sizes go up, of course). it will also scale to 4095 boxes on one storage system. truly, a product that is good enough at the right price point, so truly great.

this low-end play is too little, too late. now that other vendors are commoditizing this space, NetApp and other premium storage players will have less market share and more pressure.

i'm sure they miss the old days, when they could charge 10 to 50 times as much for exactly the same system. i bet they'd love some protectionist legal action just now...

Who needs a $3K, 4TB iSCSI implementation when you can get an inexpensive NAS RAID for about the same price?

I can see it...sort of...at the higher levels, but the "S" setup seems like horrible overkill for the alleged market: people who won't grow much (e.g. the proverbial dentists) and who need as few moving parts as possible.

"S" for "Stupid" on netapp's part.

Err... the point is that this has much of the functionality of a true SAN at a NAS price point.

Let's see you do instant snapshots on that Conraid box. Then provide them seamlessley to windows clients via Microsoft's Shadow Copy Client. That's something most SAN's can't even achieve, it's more functionality than you even get out of a standard windows server.

We were very intersted in the S500, unfortunately it was just a fraction too small for our needs. I would say NetApp do need to expand this range, but they need to go upwards. At the moment there's just too much of a gap between these and their low end FAS range.

I was about to buy it too... Then I saw that I would need to have a Windows PC to manage it as the StoreVault version of OnTap has no ssh/rsh/telnet/http and no CLI..

This is a real showstopper for me.. I'm a massive NetApp fan - OnTap is so feature rich, but the 3k$ pricetag is less attractive when I need to add a PC+Windoof licence to manage the thing.