Guys,

We're looking to spec out a big Netapp cluster, and since 7-mode is
end of life in terms of new features, and it looks like 8.2.1RC1 is
now out, what do people think of it?

One question I have is whether I should get a bunch of 3250s in
cluster pairs, on the order of four or six heads all clustered
together, or whether it makes more sense to get a 6250 pair (or
pairs?) instead.

We're looking at roughtly 1 Petabyte of storage.  Probably 50% can be
SATA, the rest SAS, but possibly <20% would need to be FC LUNs for
Oracle DBs doing some ERP stuff.  Lots of IOPs will happen there.
Another thought is to get SSDs and setup FlexPools.  Which is nice
since you can prioritze volumes to get that speedup.  But which costs
like crazy from what I hear.

I'm hesitant of putting all my eggs into one big basket.

After talking with a FE, it looks like there are all sorts of goodies
in 8.2.1 and up, such that we can setup multiple Virtual Filers (now
known as SVMs I think) on the cluster and do transparent volume moves
across heads/aggregates, etc.  And moving a SVM from one cluster head
to another or to another set of nodes in the cluster.

My question of course, is how well dows this work in practise?  Esp
for FCP luns.  Being able to live move volumes between aggregates
looks to be a real help, since now I won't be stuck withe large, but
not endless aggregates.

Basically, I'm looking for what people think of how well this all
works in real life and what the gotchas are.  And of course, what
about tape backups over direct attached SAN FC tape drives from an
SVM?  How is that performance as well?

Thanks,
John
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