Hi, we are considering going with one or more filers for our free hosting service. I've got some basic questions that I hope you all can help us out with. (I'll ask Netapp too whenever they return my voice mail..)
Can you add drives to a file without shutting down? How would you add shelves/adapters?
Is the filer OS considered secure? Y2K compliant? Would you feel safe running your filer attached to potentially hostile web servers running user-uploaded CGI programs?
Can we use third party drives/shelves/canisters/mem?
Will 18GB and larger drives work ok? (Seagate just announced 36GB half-height drives...)
What kind of real-world bandwidth can it put out (F740) ? I see the transaction specs, but what about sustained mbits in a web-type environment (3x more reads than writes)?
If you use Cisco Fast EtherChannel, does it failover to the lower bandwidth if you are using multiple network links ? (assume a CF environment) ?
If yes, and assuming you are using CF with two filers, wouldn't that be a system with no single point of failure, or is there anything else we should worry about?
Works with these systems over nfs: http(apache), news(inn and dnews), dns(bind), mail(qmail), ftp(NcFTPd), Frontpage ?
Does the CF cost extra? (for the software.. I know it takes a second filer :-)
Does Netapp charge for OS upgrades beyond a certain time period?
Finally, do you feel there are any serious contenders to Netapp that we should check out? Anyone tried the EMC Symmetrix stuff or Artecon LnyxNSS systems?
Thanks