From what I see, both the 3220/4350 support FC targets.
SO, I am not sure about your comment. I use SAN on my nodes. You can set up one or more vServers (very similar, but slightly different than a vFiler) to serve FC/iSCSI LUNS and/or NFS/CIFS traffic
In my case (I am a partner and did my own Professional Services work), I was able to procure a new FAS3170 pair with a TON of disks (enough to split betwixt 4 other heads!)
I staged my data one or a few volume(s) at a time. WIth tools, I was able to use the equivalent of SnapMirror to send traffic to the new Clustered ONTAP. After the data was migrated we updated maps and pointed to the new locations.
It took about three months, but I had something like 400 volumes to move. Got it done.
Your milage will vary. Bottom line, it would likely be best to secure the use of NetApp Professional Services to aid in the migration effort if you have a large/complicated installation.
--tmac
*Tim McCarthy* *Principal Consultant*
Clustered ONTAP Clustered ONTAP NCDA ID: XK7R3GEKC1QQ2LVD RHCE6 110-107-141https://www.redhat.com/wapps/training/certification/verify.html?certNumber=110-107-141&isSearch=False&verify=Verify NCSIE ID: C14QPHE21FR4YWD4 Expires: 08 November 2014 Current until Aug 02, 2016 Expires: 08 November 2014
On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 3:50 PM, John Stoffel john@stoffel.org wrote:
tmac> It may be a tiny bit more complicated, however, after you tmac> administer it for a short while you will find it is very close tmac> to 7-mode.
tmac> I now prefer it to 7-mode due to many enhancements (too many to tmac> list mind you).
But what about the limitations? We looked at it when we moved up to 3220s and 3250 pairs, but in particular the vFilers not being able to do SAN FC LUNs was a big turn off for us. I wanted to setup a certain group in a vFiler, but since they are FC only mostly, it was a no-go.
We're currently running 8.1.2 in 7-mode and fairly happy. Thinking up upgrades, but if it ain't seriously broke, why bother?
Also, how would we migrate from 7-mode to cluster mode with a minimum of hassle?