I put in a FAS2020HA last year, and we’re looking to do a little expansion. We currently just have the base unit, with 600GB SAS drives. We’d like to add a shelf for our testing environment. We asked for a quote from our reseller but it was astronomical, so we’ve looked into the used market. Other than the added equipment not being covered by my service & support contract, is there any issue buying a ds14mk4 and installing it?

Assuming I do add it, I need some help figuring out my fiber connections. We’re currently NFS, but I’ve recently procured some HBA’s, as well as switches. To make things more interesting, we currently do our backup over fiber to an HP Autoloader connected directly to the first filer.

Here are my concerns:

1) I’ve been told that you can’t put a tape backup on a fiber switch with a netapp. True? If so, can I just leave it connected to filer A, and then only connect the second FC port to the switch? I know I’m looking at a point of failure there, but that would be temporary until we change our backup infrastructure.

2) Can you hang a shelf off a fiber switch as well? Is there any concern of doing that given question 1?