On Fri, Oct 26, 2001 at 01:27:59PM -0400, kevin graham wrote:
This is on my older f720, and I just got a f740. Is it much of an upgrade
in CPU?
Its been forever since I've looked at specs, but I believe each step in the 700's included a marginal cpu clock speed bump as well, double the ram (256mb 720, 512mb 740, 1024mb 760), and more PCI (each step down from the 760 progressively carved up the system board w/ a different position for the edge connector).
If I recall correctly, the CPU & memory differences are:
F720 F740 F760 ---- ---- ---- CPU 21164A (MHz) 400 400 600 RAM (MB) 256 512 1024 NVRAM (MB) 8 32 32
There's also a difference in # of PCI slots, etc. From examination (when I got my first F7x0 :), the motherboards look effectively the same except for the number of PCI slots soldered on the system, and the `fit out' in terms of CPU speed, RAM and NVRAM installed. I suspect that the F8x0s are the same; this makes sense from a manufacturing point of view.
The thing that's probably killing your F720 the most is the crippled amount of NVRAM. There's various ways you can observe this. One simple way is to look at the output of 'sysstat 1' on the console when the filer is under load. If the disks are constantly being written to, (without gaps of a few seconds), that can indicate that your NVRAM is being filled and flushed all the time. There's other commands you can use to analyse this that are covered in the advanced NetApp training courses, and your local SE should be able to help you here too.
Unfortunately, unlike earlier systems (e.g, the F330) which had the ability to have an NVRAM upgrade (e.g, from 2MB to 8MB), NetApp doesn't support upgrading the NVRAM (or RAM) in the F720. I don't know if OnTAP would recognise and support an F740 NVRAM card in an F720 (it probably does :), but NetApp wouldn't support that. What you can do is replace the F720 head with an F740 head (a 5 minute swapover without any software modes) and you'd notice an immediate difference.
Hope that helps, Luke.