Do you see any point in upgrading from a F840 to a F880 or F880c, besides the clustering factor?
On a related note, does anyone know how many pci busses are on the various 800 series? Infering from the expansion card installation guides, I'm guessing (hoping?) there's atleast two 66mhz/64bit busses, but it strikes me that you'd really need 3 to accomodate a nicely loaded filer (ie 3 fc-als', 2 gbits).
...and does the product-lit max of 3 fc-al adapters apply to a clustered config as well, or is the max actually 3+3? The docs aren't real clear (http://www.netapp.com/ftp/fseries_specs.pdf) for the 880c/840c "Max number of FC Loops -- 3", "Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop Disk Adapters -- 8 max". Huh? if the max loops was 4, it might make sense (leaving the remain 4 of the 'max adapters' for a dual-attach or CF setup).
While looking at this, I also tripped acaross the X2044A -- is it dual-loop or just dual-attach? In either case are there restrictions on it? I'm specially thinking of CF setups, where using the second loop for the partner disks would be nice, as you could spread your 'local' loops across a couple adapters, and only double them up in a failover condition.
Ugh. Not that I've got the budget to actually worry about it... ..kg..
ps. pir - could you please have the listserv reject the html-in-text/plain messages?