I've got two F740's on order, whose sole task will be to provide storage for a couple of Sun E450 Oracle boxes. I plan to have each filer attached to both E450's via crossover full-duplex 100baseT, plus a third 100baseT on the filer to the rest of the LAN. Is there any reason to go with the QFE board besides port density (which I don't really need?) Are there plans to do FastEtherChannel on it?
The F740 has six available PCI slots, and I will likely not require more than the one on-board FC-AL controller (plus perhaps an additional one for clustering). Three single Fast Ethernet interfaces are cheaper than one QFE, failure of one only downs one interface, the load can be spread over more than one PCI bus (I don't know if this an issue on the Alpha boards) and they are cheaper to replace. OTOH, will the clustering software failover a filer if any one of its NIC's dies, and will that be support on both the single and quad NIC's?