Cwaeth Marc MERLIN:
What you can do, is get a new motherboard (say an MVP3 based MB, with an AMD 350, and 512M of RAM), but I'd be willing to bet that it's not going to work because most likely the intel netapp code will barf on some unknown chipset (MVP3, PCI bridge, or god knows what else).
That's actually quite true, though we didn't design that way just to thwart you. The platform-specific layers of ONTAP were written largely from scratch, and since we didn't have to be portable they are fairly closely adapted to the 82434NX (Neptune) chipset. This was quite the chipset in its day, but that was a couple of years ago and you can't find it in new designs. (I don't think it's giving too much away to say that a major motivation for the F720 was to replace the 200-series filers with something running a modern chipset.)
Also, the F200/F300 motherboard has some atypical PCI interrupt routing and a bunch of built-in devices (environment sensors, for instance) that aren't present on typical PCs. Finally, the PCI-based filers pretty much expect Open Firmware, which isn't generally available on PCs.
Should you have an old netapp that you're truly not doing anything with, and don't mind taking apart, you can always try with a somewhat less recent pentium motherboard, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work. Obviously, you also can't expect to ever call NA about that system again :-)
Um, yes, I suppose that would also be a consideration.
Mike Tuciarone Platform S/W Guy, Speaker-To-Firmware, Maker of Burnt Offerings to the Assembler God