Todd,
I cannot answer on behalf of our marketing group etc., but I would see a few obstacles:
1. Partner node needs to take care of both nodes activity in takeover mode, so it cannot be that much lower than other node. 2. We sell active-active clustering, so both nodes are active, and customer is not wasting his money for any passive protection. It leads you to the point that it may not worth the complexity to sell such a setup. 3. Technically, you must have same NVRAM size, and I believe you should also have reasonably close response times for any NVRAM mirroring and general underlying OS activity. That just makes non-equal nodes business more complex than one might think. 4. Anyway - customers reactions are always welcome here, and I'll run this to cluster devel. group, and see if they have to say anything....
Yours, Eyal.
---------------------------------------------------------------------- eTraitel - I'm the new eBuzzword around !!! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Eyal Traitel - Filer Escalation Engineer CNA, MCSE, CSA, NetApp CA
Network Appliance BV Holland Office Center Kruisweg 799b 2132 NG, Hoofddorp The Netherlands Office: +31 23 567 9685 Cellular: +31 6 5497 2568 Email: eyal@netapp.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Get answers NOW! - NetApp On the Web - http://now.netapp.com ----------------------------------------------------------------------
-----Original Message----- From: Todd C. Merrill [mailto:tmerrill@mathworks.com] Sent: Friday, March 09, 2001 6:11 PM To: Traitel, Eyal Cc: 'max chan'; toasters@mathworks.com Subject: RE: cluster using F740 and F760
From: max chan [mailto:maxchan0@yahoo.com]
Is it possible to use F740 and F760 as a cluster pair?
On Mon, 5 Mar 2001, Traitel, Eyal wrote:
No, sorry. This is unsupported.
Ah, but is it *possible*? ;)
You can put 1 GB of memory into an F740 to match the 1 GB in an F740. That is unsupported too, but possible. Ask me how I know.
So, what's the real reason why it's not supported, clustering two non-exact-but-in-the-same-family filers? Is there something technically preventing it? Is is a marketing/sales decision? Is it to protect the unwashed masses from their own stupidity?
Why not allow a lower-end filer take over a higher-end one? You're in a degraded mode in the first place during a failover condition, so why not allow a calculated risk?
Until next time...
The Mathworks, Inc. 508-647-7000 x7792 3 Apple Hill Drive, Natick, MA 01760-2098 508-647-7001 FAX tmerrill@mathworks.com http://www.mathworks.com ---