I wrote:
It seems...inconvenient for those who upgraded to ONTAP 6 on F760s to have to revert back to 5.3.6.x in order to upgrade to the F840s. The release of ONTAP 6 couldn't wait until a port to the x86 code was ready for the F840s?
Bruce Sterling Woodcock wrote:
I'm not from NetApp, but the only reason you needed to downgrade to 5.3.6 before proceeding with a 7xx to 8xx conversion is because you chose to do so now, rather than wait. In the future, 6.0 will be available for the F840. Then you head swap would be a lot simpler.
Sorry if I implied that we went through a 5->6->5 process; we didn't. We went from 5.3.4R2D2P2Q7K8... to 5.3.6H1. I was just saying the lack of a coincident release for x86 and alpha filers for 5.3.6H1 *and* 6.x can be inconvenient, annoying, and confusing. [0] I was asking for NetApp's thoughts on why they did it this way. "Rush to market" or "we forked the code base way too long ago to go back now" are perfectly valid answers! ;)
Our upgrade from an F760 (5.3.4R2D2..) to an F840 (5.3.6H1) was straightforward, requiring 15-20 minutes of downtime instead of the usual 2-3. I could have tested 5.3.6H1 on the F840 before putting it into production, but after a couple hours of tracking down previous bugs we've run into and checking them against the 5.3.6H1 release, the risk seemed low, so straight into production with an (internally) untested release the F840 went, in order to relieve the strain on our F760.
risk reward ------------------- ^ Hmmm...now that I drew this picture, I don't know how to indicate which side "wins." Is up good? Or is down like weight scales good? Anyway, so far, so good for us. Reward won.
[0] Remember SGI IRIX 6.2 for these machines, 6.3 for those machines, and 6.4 for yet other machines? Ick. They *finally* cleaned it up when 6.5 was released for all their platforms.
Until next time...
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