On Fri, 19 Nov 1999, Jay Orr wrote:
Amen to that!! I was blown away when we upgraded our filers from 3.1 to 5.3.2R1 (a jump of 2 major changes) and it was the most painless thing in the world - took less then 5 minutes, most of which was verifing it was working well after the upgrade.
I don't think I would be straying far from truth if I said that our older NetApps behave pretty well. A reboot here and there once in a while, but for the most part pretty stable. However, the newer FC-AL boxes turn out to be nothing but trouble. I don't think we have a box which we have been operating for more than 4 months that did not necessitate a LRC or a disk replacement. On top of that a slew of failed fans and the inability to correctly takeover a failed system. If Dan was talking about the 330s and 500s then he was pretty accurate (Well one of our 500s gave out it's spirit two months or so ago), but the 600 and 700 series certainly do not live up to the refrigerator comparison. It seems that the more resilient a box is to be theoretically the more failure prone it is in practice.
Tom