| Any thoughts on what the Intel/Digital settlement means to NetApp and | its customers? It sure looks (to me anyway) as though the Alpha is dead.
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I remember when NetApp was talking about the f540, their first venture outside the Intel x86 based filers. We were all concerned about the switch of technology. But look where it has taken us.
One of the big advantages of the appliance approach is that the CPU makes no difference to the user, so we are free to use the best chip available at the time. (Pop quiz: What chip is in your Cisco router?)
We do our internal development on SPARC chips, because we have a filer simulator that runs as a UNIX process under SunOS, and of course we've shipped both x86 and Alpha products.
As a result, we've already debugged the portability issues associated with 32-bits vs 64-bits, CISC vs RISC, and big-endian vs little-endian. (Actually, CISC vs RISC doesn't really have any portability issues, but it makes the list longer. :-)
If I were developing a general purpose system, I would be very afraid of the Alpha, but for an appliance the choice was easy because the performance, especially for data-moving functions like file service, just can't be beat.
I don't mean to imply that there's no overhead associated with changing chips, because there are compiler issues and test issues and boot PROM issues and performance issues. But in the grand scheme of things, switching chips isn't that big of a deal.
Dave