First off, thank you Dave for an excellent summary.
And now for a few comments:
FAServer 400 The first box. A black tower tower unit. The systems units held 7 GB and could do 400 ops/sec. (Hence the name.)
We've got one of these. It's got 7x2GB disks for 14 GB of disk space that, with parity and file system overhead comes out to about 10 GB of usable RAID storage. It's been in the back closet for almost a year now, but we still periodically think about playing with it again. If we don't find a production use for it soon, and if netapp doesn't offer a good trade in value for it, I think my boss is gonna let me take it home and play with it.
Originally they used 1GB disks - later it was 2GB. Eventually made it do about 700 ops/sec with the 2.1 software, I think. It was a horrible box to service. One could also get a second black box (expansion cabinet) to hold 7 more drives. They were connected externally by a SCSI cable.
This is a 486/50 CPU, EISA bus. Originally used the ASUS motherboard; later switch to the NICE.
FAServer 450 Same box, but with a faster CPU. Maybe we also allowed the expansion cabinet (a second black tower) at the same time.
We've got a few of these in use right now. These took 4 GB disks and had room for 14 disks inside (slightly bigger box, beige). I know we've got at least one, possible 2 or 3 still in production use. The one I know about has 7x2GB and 7x4GB for about 30 GB effective storage.
Right. The 450 was the much taller beige box which held 14 drives. It was not the black box.
F220 NUCLEAR BANANA BEZEL!!! Ahem. This is a cost
Got one of these. It does suport for some production machines, cuz we wanted to split off the F330, where the users constantly use up all the available space and take more, from the production NFS server, where we control and even, to some degree, predict how much space each service uses.
There are two version of the F220 system board, II and IIa.
So, I've got two more questions, one semi-technical, and one not:
- How do you delete the file system on a NetApp? If I want to newfs the
file system, how do I do it?
Boot off floppy and choose "install new file system".
- What are the various names people have given their machines? We've had
toaster, blender, fridge, icebox, tv, vcr, vaccuum, washer, compactor, furnace, and microwave. (No, we don't have that many netapps--some of these names are on different interfaces of the same boxes, or a box that was retired, and then reused elsewhere with a different name.)
We use a "power tools" theme in house:
makita bosch ryobi dewalt stanley
and so on.
Bruce