1999-12-29-20:34:36 E Hunter:
I'm looking for infomation on NetApps because the company I'm working for is considering a 760 for our network.
Congratulations! Netapps aren't the cheapest disk available, but they may just be the nicest.
I have been told by someone who is only vaguely familiar with the NetApps that the filesystem has to be maintained in some way by running a _wac_ command, but I have been unable to find any information on such a command in a week of searching. Can anyone fill me in on the use of this _wac_ command, what it does, how often it needs to be done, and whehter or not the filer requires downtime to do it?
Lurking on a list like this could give you the impression that this is a routine maintenance chore, but it ain't:-).
When you get at something like the toasters list, you are seeing a tight population of a lot of the heaviest users of netapps, and they only tend to post things when stuff blows up. And if you follow the analysis to its end, it's surprising how often the final answer ends up being "boy, I shouldn't have done that, next time I'll RTFM first".
I've only worked in two companies that used Netapps, and that only for maybe two years altogether, but I ended up working with about a half-dozen of the gizmos over time, and they were invariably plug-'em-in and they go, then you get to forget them.
The trickiest maintenance chore isn't intrinsic to Netapps as such, but rather comes with the territory whenever you start pushing up near a terabyte of data; big horking disk farms exceed the capacity of any available tape media. So backups are no longer a no-brainer. Brains required. Netapp does everything to make it as easy as possible. I'd say WAFL's snapshots are the biggest reason for not considering anything _other_ than a netapp for storing terabytes. For a lot of purposes, my favourite backup strategy is to (a) have a cold spare netapp in the rack (one such cold spare is plenty for many hot toasters), (b) make sure you have a couple of times as much disk space total as you need, so you can collect plenty of snapshots, and (c) occasionally spin a stack of DLTs to back up a candidate snapshot, however often you need archival coverage. For offsite coverage I'd still go with online replication if I could; I've replicated a _lot_ of data with rsync-over-ssh, if you're not in a hurry it just keeps on slogging. You do have to carve the job up into subdirs and sync 'em separately, since rsync builds some O(nfiles) data structures. I would use snapshots for "oops, I wish I hadn't deleted that" coverage, I'd trust the toaster's raid to protect against disk loss, leaving only archival tapes that have to be spun. And DLT juke boxes that can handle 22 tapes aren't that expensive, heavy, or bulky. I recently set up an ADIC FastStor 22 URL:http://www.adic.com/ and it's quite nice. That's somewhere around 1.5TB worth without you having to get up and change tapes. As long as you aren't in a hurry (_love_ them snapshots!) you don't have to work too hard.
-Bennett