Hello Toasters.
I started a paper a long while back that outlines and gave examples for utilizing old NetApp Filers and NetCache gear on Linux systems. I just found it half completed yesterday. I can't recall why I never finished it, but I guess I didn't think anyone was interesed.
Anyway, I've clean it up and made it avalible. If you have old F700/F800 gear just sitting around you can use a spare X86 system with Linux and the parts from the NetApp you already have to build all sorts of interesting storage solutions for mail servers, file servers, directory servers or any other storage you need but don't have budget for. Take your investment and put it back to use.
The paper is here: http://www.cuddletech.com/articles/netapp/netapp-evms.html
You can see how I use one of my old FC9 shelves here: http://www.cuddletech.com/a64/
And even how I used a shelf together with a spare Brocade Silkworm 2800 to build a "no-cost" SAN for my internal testing purposes!: http://www.cuddletech.com/cuddle-san.jpeg (In this picture you can see an F840 I use for iSCSI and OnTap testing, an F5 load balancer which is balancing Solaris Zones on my Ultra2, and a Brocade Silkworm 2800 using QuickLoop to attach an FC8 shelf to 2 Sun Workstations providing SAN storage)
Hope this is useful to someone.
benr.