Hi,
Are any of the NetApp 630 accessories like hard disks, disk shelves, NIC cards, and RAM for the NetApp available via any other source than NetApp? Their prices for the add-ins are quite high and I am trying to plan out a system purchase now.
Quick responses really appreciated. :-)
-w
Wayne D. Correia 1-415-826-6000
OK my two cents worth:
1. Never Ever Ever buy 100T NIC from anyone but netapp. 2. If you are only buying one why bother? The trouble is not worth the cost. 3. If you don't have the in house expertise and contacts to figure out things like disk firmware, RAM types ect ect yourself you probably should buy from us. Because you are going to have to do some invistigation probably with an pci sniffer. 4. The 630 is brand new it has a new mother board, NVRAM card disk shelf and disks. This is not the time to twiddle with it. The 520, 230 and 220 have been out for at least a year so people who wanted to add there own hardware have already tried it and figured out what worked. This is sort of like human expmentation... it has to happen but you would rather have it happen to someone else. Given that we started shipping 630's a couple of months ago I am not sure I would trust anyones advice on substatutions that work until January.
Assembling a working system from "off the shelf" components is not as easy as it looks. Everyone is continually "improving" everything so two products that look identical can have wildly differing behavior. One of our big jobs is NOT changing things and this sometimes requires lots of effort (such as searching the wholesalers of the world for parts that have been EOL'ed). Unless this is your job or you have a lot of spare time I don't recomend it.
Sean
FYI: The first thing I did when I came to netapp was to look at the firmware levels of the disks in our performance lab. They happened to be pre-production freebees and were way behind the current shipping disks. I replaced them with new disks and the performance went up by 50%. Disk firmware matters.
Sean O'Malley Network Appliance Corp 2770 San Tomas Expressway Santa Clara, CA 95051 Phone: 408 367-3266 Fax: 408 367 3151 Email: sean@netapp.com