"...you'd better have some deep pockets to play with thats all"

Oh come ON Edward.

NOBODY is going to actually pay NetApp's support and maintenance charges for a filer at home. It's very clear that home NetApp's are self-supported, for exactly the reason of NetApp's support charges. If you are in a round-about and unclear manner suggesting that NetApp should have a "second-tier" support model for non-commercial use, then your comments start to make more sense. But I doubt if NetApp would ever see that as viable or worthwhile.

If you think NetApp's hardware maintenance and software support charges are expensive, have a look at HDS and EMC as well....

The fact is that vendors like EMC, HDS, NetApp etc. have very high internal costs associated with providing support, partly due to the (necessarily) proprietary nature of their solutions and the massive overhead involved in ongoing development in a fiercely competitive market. If you really understood the issues you would see that their support charges are anything but excessive - in fact NetApp are one of the better-behaved vendors in this regard.

regards,

Alan McLachlan
___________________________________
Solution Architect - Data Centre Solutions
Dimension Data Australia
Alan.McLachlan@didata.com.au
Tel. +61 (0)2 61225123
Fax +61 (0)2 62486346
Mobile 0428 655644
----- Forwarded by Alan McLachlan on 09/11/2004 09:24 AM -----
Edward Valencia <edjv@corp.earthlink.net>
Sent by: owner-toasters@mathworks.com

09/11/2004 05:20 AM

       
        To:        Ben Rockwood <BRockwood@homestead-inc.com>
        cc:        mikka makka <mikkamakka@hotmail.com>, toasters@mathworks.com
        Subject:        Re: F740 at home -- please help me!



Oh dont get me wrong, playing with these machines is great, but to use
them at home for more than just learning is a different story. I was
just daying you'd better have some deep pockets to play with thats all.

edwardv-



Ben Rockwood wrote:

> I will remind you Edward that many of the users who wish to use Filers
> at home are trying to improve their skills.  Obviously buying a couple
> 200G IDE/SATA disks is a better solution, but give us fellas who like
> to hack at home because it's all we've got a little credit. :)
>
> This only strikes a nerve with me because it's at the heart of the old
> legal issues of off-support heads.
>
> benr.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From:                 owner-toasters@mathworks.com on behalf of Edward Valencia
> Sent:                 Sun 11/7/2004 12:24 PM
> To:                 mikka makka
> Cc:                 toasters@mathworks.com
> Subject:                 Re: F740 at home -- please help me!
> You must like to waste electricity this is a wrothless product to have
> at home. Get 7 200gb drives a pci raid controller and a decent pc and
> you have a better nfs/samba server than both those two machines
> combined. Also the rate that the disk failures occur on such old systems
> you will need alot of spares, the cost isnt worth it. Sell it on ebay or
> something and use the money to build the system described.
>
> To be able to download the software for your netapps, you will need to
> register the heads and then see if they have the software entitlement
> enabled. As I said these systems are worthless for home usage. Since
> netapp makes thier money on supporting the harwdware, than the hardware
> itself. The cost to enable parts replacements on 13 F760s for us was
> 135k a year. Ten thousand a year for next day support and a nfs license.
> Tells you alot.
>
>
> Edwardv-
>
> mikka makka wrote:
>
>
>>Hi all,
>>
>>Last year I inherited an F740 filer with two FC9 shelves (7x36 GB
>>disks).  I used it happily at home for a few months and then a disk
>>began to fail -- one had already failed, so that put the unit out of
>>commission although luckily I was able to get all my data off it before
>>total lossage.  I bought a couple of Seagate ST136403FC drives -- the
>>same model number as in the drive carriers --  off ebay and tried
>>swapping them in, but no luck; the system wouldn't recognize them.  On a
>>hunch that it might have to do with firmware I tried swapping the
>>drive's controller boards (old drives' controllers with new drives), but
>>that didn't work either; the system wouldn't come up, dumping core for
>>some reason.  I figured the drives themselves probably needed to be
>>zeroed/initialized/labeled in some way that made them acceptable to the
>>Netapp, but I couldn't figure out any way to get the Netapp up and into
>>a mode that would let me do that.  Finally, lacking documentation for
>>the system, I gave up.
>>
>>Fast-forward a little, I just inherited a second filer, an F720, also
>>with two FC9 (7x36) shelves.   As far as I know all disks good.  
>>Unfortunately it won't boot up (it finds and loads the image, gives the
>>"Initializing PCI devices" and then suddenly reboots itself, without
>>even dumping core).  I'm not sure what the problem could be.
>>
>>I tried plugging in some of the disks from the new shelves in place of
>>the bad disks in the old one, and now the 740 starts up and gives me a
>>"File system may be scrambled" message -- well, of course it is, since
>>the replaced disks contain who-knows-what, but I don't see how I can
>>proceed from there.  I'm not worried about getting back the original
>>file system as I backed it up -- I just want to clear everything out and
>>make a new one.
>>
>>The situation seems to me to be this:  I've got an F740 (and a spare
>>F720), and four shelves with a grand total of 26 good, identical, disks
>>(and maybe even 28, if I could get the drive controller swap to work).  
>>That's 900GB of storage.
>>
>>I'm sure I should be able somehow to hook the four shelves up to the
>>740, reinitialize the whole system and all the drives somehow, and start
>>afresh with a working 900GB filesystem.  But I don't have the docs and
>>floppy or whatever that came with the filers and I have no idea how to
>>proceed given that the filer won't even start up to give me a command
>>prompt that I might be able to work with.  I'm not sure if I would need
>>to boot from a floppy (I don't have one) or what...
>>
>>Is there anyone out there who could help, in any way?  I'd be forever
>>grateful...  For the few months I had the 740 running, it was heaven --
>>amazing having a file server like this at home, even though I was using
>>only the smallest fraction of its capabilities.  Now that I have four
>>disk shelves, I'm really motivated to get it working again, but I'm
>>truly stuck without documentation
>>
>>Thanks so much for any help you could offer,
>>Adam Jacobs
>>mikkamakka@hotmail.com
>>
>>.
>>
>>_________________________________________________________________
>>Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today it's FREE!
>>http://messenger.msn.com/
>>
>
>
>
>
>



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