Lori> we have the opportunity to build several filers from scratch for Lori> our LAN, which will serve all departments in the company, Lori> fileshare through Samba, host htdocs for the internal web site, Lori> etc. can someone please point me to a good document that offers Lori> guidelines for doing the rearchitecting?
You'll find some on the NetApp web site, but in general I've got a couple of suggestions for you:
1. Goto Data OnTap 7.x, the latest release that's available. 2. Put all your data into FlexVols. And then into qtrees inside the flexvols.
Lori> our architecture is currently flat- one volume per filer with Lori> the data only split up into separate directories.
Are you using qtrees at all? I find them to be very useful.
Lori> all hosts can mount all directories on all volumes if needed.
Sure, makes sense. I assume you use permissions to keep people from touching what they shouldn't?
Lori> it does makes sense to have multiple volumes for varying snap Lori> schedules, for instance; however i'd like to learn more about Lori> what the trade-offs are because i do understand there is a Lori> storage penalty.
The big big big thing about OnTap 7G is that you now have FlexVols, which means you can grow and shrink volumes as easily as you grow/shrink qtree quotas. There are some gotchas in terms of the number of Volumes you can have per-filer, I think it's 200 FlexVols currently.
Lori> the security paradigm is to depend on firewall protection on Lori> the perimeter and to have a relatively open internal network. Lori> backups will be snap mirrors to a sibling filer at our offsite Lori> colo, with an occasional archival to tape for some of the data.
Sounds fine to me. Go with 7G and FlexVols, you'll be happy.
John John Stoffel - Senior Staff Systems Administrator - System LSI Group Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. - http://www.toshiba.com/taec john.stoffel@taec.toshiba.com - 508-486-1087