* When that happens, is the entire filer shut down and control * transferred to the filer, or is the software able to failover * individual interfaces (and, say, not take over the disk shelves)? On * a failover situation, since the MAC addresses are migrated, do we need * enough physical Ethernet interfaces on one filer to cover for both, or * can one port appear with more than one MAC address?
During a takeover, the entire workload of the failed filer is transferred over to the remaining filer by having the remaining filer takeover the failed filer's disks and network interfaces. No additional (redundant) Fast Ethernet network interfaces are required for the remaining filer to do this, since we support multiple MAC and IP addresses on our Fast Ethernet interfaces.
One quick note, (I've been politely reminded by our product manager that <g>) our first Clustered Failover release will not support Cisco Fast EtherChannel or other port trunking solutions. So in the short-term you'll have to decide if you want automated network interface failure protection or automated CPU / RAM / PCI failure protection.
-Val. ============================================== Val Bercovici (613)724-8674 Systems Engineer valb@netapp.com Network Appliance www.netapp.com Ottawa, Canada FAST,SIMPLE,RELIABLE ==============================================