First, let me say that replying to you is a real pain. You should reconfigure your email so that it sends plaintext messages, not putting your message in an attachment. It makes it very difficult to respond to.
When did the time increase to 2.6-6.6 times that once-proud 45-second figure?
At about release 3.0. You have lots more that has to initialize now.... more drives (probably), CIFS, NIS, Java, etc. Of course, the less you have, the faster it will boot.
However, I was specifically talking about in the case of a crash, in which case you have a savecore in there. That takes time.
At 5 minutes, that means Netapps are no longer booting significantly faster than generic servers.
I'd call it significant.
Someone told me recently they tested it out and got some exact times for certain configurations, but I can't find the reference to what they were. They were under 5 minutes IIRC.
Bruce