+--- In a previous state of mind, kls@netapp.com (Karl Swartz) wrote: | | It won't ever change, because the drivers can't do what the hardware | doesn't support. We've looked at support for the AceNIC 2, which I | believe can handle multiple MAC addresses in addition to having much | higher performance, but the engineer working on that has been focused | on higher-priority projects.
I for one would rather have a single gigabit nic per filer as opposed to 2 per filer. In large clusters this gets real expensive quick. At $3k per NIC, seems like a better supported card is in order...
Sure. And our customers who can actually push an F760 hard enough to saturate a single AceNIC 1 would probably rather not have to buy two just to get the full bandwidth.
On the other hand, there probably are a lot of customers who would rather have failover *now* even if it only works with 100base-TX or FDDI (or requires extra GbE NICs). If we told a FDDI customer that we'd be able to give them failover today but we won't because we've not finished a driver for a GbE NIC that can handle multiple MAC addresses, they'd probably be a bit peeved.
Still other customers are happy with the current GbE (or don't care) and don't care about failover, but want other features. Presumably we've decided that it makes more business sense to give some of those wishes higher priority than failover *and* GbE *and* a single NIC.
So, your options at the moment are (a) use GbE but not have failover (b) use failover but not GbE (c) buy a second GbE NIC and have both failover and and GbE (d) wait until we have a GbE NIC and driver which will allow you to have failover with a single GbE
You'll be able to have your cake and eat it, too, but you'll just have to wait a bit.
Plus, what about filers with only single 64bit slots?
That would be the F630. On that filer, we only use the 64-bit slots (there is a second, but it must contain the NVRAM) in 32-bit mode because of some chipset problems. Still, that's the only available primary PCI slot, so the second card would have to go in a secondary slot. On the other hand, if you've taken over for a failed partner, you'll have degraded performance anyway.
-- Karl Swartz - Technical Marketing Engineer Network Appliance Work: kls@netapp.com http://www.netapp.com/ Home: kls@chicago.com http://www.chicago.com/~kls/