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13515 discussions

NetApp F220 worth it?
by Janne Frosen 02 Apr '97

02 Apr '97

Hello, I just joined this mailing list, mainly to hear comments about the NetApps in practice. Our lab is planning to (maybe) purchase a NetApp F220. The simple question is: Is it worth it? ie. where are the true savings that justify the high price? As a comparison, it's possible to get the same amount of NFS disk with 2-3 times less $$. Will the additional features make up for it.. What was the deciding factor for you to get it? (Sorry if this is a boring FAQ) //Janne -- Janne Fr|sen <a href="http://iki.fi/jaf/"> jaf(a)iki.fi </a> Finland, Helsinki University of Technology, CS

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Re: NetApp F220 worth it?
by David Drum 02 Apr '97

02 Apr '97

Tom Yates penned: > i reckon this is going to be a full-blown FAQ. you fancy collating > those replies, sorting them into some kind of summary, and posting > that when the question's asked? or maybe just volunteering to send > it to anyone who asks the question? to coin a rec.motoism, you could > end up being the KotWSGATTAFAQ (Keeper of the What's So Great About > Them Toasters Anyway? FAQ). I'll be happy to collate/summarize what I have received so far, but I can't yet guarantee to be a permanent keeper of the FAQ because we don't have and might not get a toaster. If worse comes to worst, I'll have to pass along what I collected to someone else. Regards, David K. Drum david(a)more.net -- "That man has a rare gift for obfuscation." -- ST:DS9 * "It's hard to be bored when you're as stupid as a line." -- Vernor Vinge * "Reality has a tendency to be so uncomfortably real." -- Neil Peart * "You can only measure the size of your head from the inside." -- Larry Wall

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Re: How do *you* manage snapshots?
by Steve Gremban 01 Apr '97

01 Apr '97

Vishy, I am backing up the toasters through nfs mounts on the OpenVision Netbackup server. The server is a Sun Ultra2 running Solaris 2.5.1. This means that nfs is multi-threaded and won't block if a mount hangs. It also means that the pathname to the mounted directory is no longer a link to /tmp_mnt/... which means it can be used without worrying about running a prebackup script to mount the directory and then backing up through /tmp_mnt. The toasters are fddi attached as is the backup server. The drives I use are DLT7000 drives and they are in an STK9710 tape library. Each tape holds 35GB native and the STK can hold 560 tapes. Our NFAS-1300 and NFAS-1400 toasters backup at about 2.6GB/hour and the F330 toasters at about 4.3GB/hour. OpenVision is working on a toaster client using the NDMP API developed by NAC and Budtool but I don't know when it will be available. I hope sooner than later. regards, Steve Gremban gremban(a)ti.com ------------- Begin Forwarded Message ------------- >From gplkrshv(a)cig.mot.com Tue Apr 1 07:47:08 1997 From: Vishy Gopalakrishnan <gplkrshv(a)cig.mot.com> Subject: Re: How do *you* manage snapshots? To: gremban(a)msp.sc.ti.com (Steve Gremban) Date: Tue, 1 Apr 1997 07:45:29 -0600 (CST) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Steve, Could you describe your NetApp-OpenVision setup ? Our site has 3 F330s which we have to start using NetBackup on (we currently do an nfs mount and use some home grown scripts). What kind of performance (transfer rates) have you been getting ? Are you using DLT drives/jukeboxes ? Has OpenVision mentioned anything about NetApp-native NetBackup clients ? Any pinters appreciated. Thanks Vishy -- Vishy Gopalakrishnan | Motorola CIG ITS ------------- End Forwarded Message -------------

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How do *you* manage snapshots?
by Steve Gremban 31 Mar '97

31 Mar '97

> We have the following policy: "snap sched 2 6 12", 2 > weeklies, 6 nightlys, and 12 hourlies. Since the data on our toasters is being edited interactively there is a high probability that lost or corrupted data will be discovered the day it occurs. By using 12 without the @ I can get back to good data to within an hour of when it was messed up on the day of occurrence. This has worked out well for us. NOTE: I am using up 20 snapshots which is the limit. If you are doing a dump (which creates its own snapshot) you should leave off 1 snapshot from the schedule. We are backing up toasters using nfs mounts and OpenVision Netbackup software. regards, Steve Gremban gremban(a)ti.com ------------- Begin Forwarded Message ------------- >From madhatta(a)turing.mathworks.com Mon Mar 31 16:43:31 1997 From: sterling(a)netapp.com (Bruce Sterling Woodcock) Subject: How do *you* manage snapshots? To: gremban(a)msp.sc.ti.com (Steve Gremban) Date: Mon, 31 Mar 1997 14:41:50 -0800 (PST) Cc: toasters(a)mathworks.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit > We have the following policy: "snap sched 2 6 12", 2 > weeklies, 6 nightlys, and 12 hourlies. Interesting. I use "snap sched 1 6 7@8,10,12,14,16,18,20". This tends to translate to about a 10 - 20% snapshot reserve depending on our filer's usage pattern... I like to keep that snapshot reserve 50 - 75% full most of the time so I have a buffer to handle large deletes gracefully when they occur. What snap reserve do you use? I am curious to hear from other admins on this issue as well. Someone else mentioned that when both the filesystem and snapshots are full, it can be very tricky and may require manually deleteing snapshots. This is quite true. As I think the manual mentions, "preventing" a snapshot from growing could lead to strange behavior (i.e. rm *failing* due to lack of disk space). The only real workaround is to keep a snap reserve large enough for your desired schedule. If you need to, buy more disk. :) Bruce -- Bruce Sterling Woodcock ------ Systems Administrator ][ sterling(a)netapp.com Network & Systems Administration - Network Appliance ][ sterling(a)netcom.com ------------- End Forwarded Message -------------

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Re: Considering buying an F330
by Steve Gremban 31 Mar '97

31 Mar '97

1) Minimizing downtime was one of our major requirements. That includes downtime due to admin tasks like patch installs and OS upgrades as well as downtime due to hardware malfunction. Fast boot time (2 minutes or so) is ensured by keeping a snapshot of the filesystem in NVRAM and journaling nfs requests that arrived since the snapshot. If the system is shut off without halting, upon bootup it will write the snapshot from NVRAM and run the journaled nfs requests guaranteeing a consistent filesystem. You don't need to run "fsck" or some other filesystem consistency checker which can take a long time to run. Most patch installs and OS upgrades are easy: untar, download, and reboot takes all of 5 minutes. The toaster has raid4 to protect against disk failure. A disk is the most likely component to fail. When a disk dies the system runs in degraded mode and your filesystem is at risk from another disk failure. The toaster can be configured for a hot spare so that raid redundancy can be restored quickly and automatically. 2) Snapshots when used correctly can save alot of time and wasted effort. If your data is created and deleted and recreated etc. etc. recurrently such as doing edit/compile/run or when running simulations over and over with incremental changes then snapshots are not a good thing. They will take over all available filesystem space (caveat: depends on how often snapshots are done, the size of your filesystem, and the amount of data that is created/deleted/changed). I restrict the data going to our toasters to that created interactively by our designers using Cadence. An IC design database may have 6 or more people working in it and if a cell disappears or the database becomes corrupted (for any of a million reasons) we only lose at most a few hours of effort by copying back a previous hourly from snapshots. We have the following policy: "snap sched 2 6 12", 2 weeklies, 6 nightlys, and 12 hourlies. regards, Steve Gremban gremban(a)ti.com

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Re: Considering buying an F330
by Steve Gremban 31 Mar '97

31 Mar '97

I use the default 20% value for snapshot reserve. On an F330 our setup looks like this: 10 disks data (35.2 GB) 2 disks snapshots (8.8 GB) 1 disk parity 1 disk hot swap. Snapshot reserve usage stays about 20% to 50% except when the toaster gets full. As Jim Davis says in his message: >This has been a sticky problem with our F220. We currently use the >default schedule in the sysadmin guide, more or less, and that means >once you get close to running out of disk space you have a problem >-- deleting files just shuffles them from the filesystem to >.snapshot, so there's no net savings in disk space. And the >.snapshot space will cheerfully spill over the 20% default. In our case you can delete 8.8GB of data in a 2 week period (we keep 2 weekly snapshots) and see an 8.8GB increase in user free space. If you delete anything beyond 8.8GB you will not see any further increase in user free space. The 8.8GB snapshot reserve has been sufficient for us on toasters where I have restricted the type of data to interactive design databases. The toaster that I allowed simulations on could only run a few hourly and 1 nightly snapshot. regards, Steve Gremban gremban(a)ti.com ------------- Begin Forwarded Message ------------- On Mon, 31 Mar 1997, Steve Gremban wrote: > I restrict the data going to our toasters to that created > interactively by our designers using Cadence. An IC design > database may have 6 or more people working in it and if a cell > disappears or the database becomes corrupted (for any of a > million reasons) we only lose at most a few hours of effort by > copying back a previous hourly from snapshots. > > We have the following policy: "snap sched 2 6 12", 2 > weeklies, 6 nightlys, and 12 hourlies. what is your snap reserve set at, may i ask? Tom Yates - Unix Chap - The Mathworks, Inc. ------------- End Forwarded Message -------------

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How does a Netapp toaster keep time?
by craig Rodrigues 31 Mar '97

31 Mar '97

Hi, I just got a Netapp box installed where I work, and the damn thing doesn't keep time properly. For some reason, the Netapp time keeps setting itself 2 hours behind the current system time. (We have a bunch of Solaris boxes mounting the Netapp). The sysadmin who looks after it in my office claims that Netapp tech support told him that the only why to correctly set the time is to type rdate on the Netapp box!!! This seems fishy to me because even after our sysadmin does this, the Netapp seems to drift back to 2 hours behind the current system time (of our Sun boxes). Any ideas? -- Craig Rodrigues craigr(a)gis.net

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Re: How does a Netapp toaster keep time?
by sthaug＠nethelp.no 31 Mar '97

31 Mar '97

> I just got a Netapp box installed where I work, > and the damn thing doesn't keep time properly. > For some reason, the Netapp time keeps setting itself > 2 hours behind the current system time. Sounds like a time zone problem. > The sysadmin who looks after it in my office claims that Netapp tech > support told him that the only why to correctly set the time > is to type rdate on the Netapp box!!! I haven't found any other way either. Not that rdate is a big deal, but I'd like to have it run regularly, *without* enabling rsh access to the NetApp. I'd like ntp even better, of course :-) Btw, our F330 is about 30 secs fast after 14 days of uptime. Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug(a)nethelp.no

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Re: Considering buying an F330
by David Drum 31 Mar '97

31 Mar '97

David Drum penned: > If you the choice to make again, would you buy another Network > Appliance, or would you get the biggest disk array you could find for > the same money? Why? Thanks for all your replies. I didn't expect the responses to be any different, really. Regards, David -- "That man has a rare gift for obfuscation." -- ST:DS9 * "It's hard to be bored when you're as stupid as a line." -- Vernor Vinge * "Reality has a tendency to be so uncomfortably real." -- Neil Peart * "You can only measure the size of your head from the inside." -- Larry Wall

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Anybody else have a F210? (black cover)
by Meng Chua 31 Mar '97

31 Mar '97

Just wondering if anyone else out ther has a F210, Black cover. We have one, and its working out great for our needs. Just wondering if anyone knows why the sales dept does not publich this product. Meng Chua meng(a)beamtech.com

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