On Wed, 24 May 2000, Kelsey Cummings wrote:
I've got a f230 with 4 shelves of 4GB disks and its replacement, an f740. I talked to netapp support and they recommended that the best method to move the data from the f230 to the f740 would be to tapes with dump and restore. I can't believe that there isn't a more efficient way
I just went thru this 6 months ago with a similar setup, an F230 with 2 shelves of 9GB drives moving to an F740. What I ended up doing was to take a level 0 dump of the original machine and load it onto the new one. I did this across the network so that I didn't have to worry about changing tapes. Once the level 0 dump/restore was finished I kicked everybody off of the old machine (shut down nfs and unexport everything) and ran a level 1 dump/restore over to the new machine. As soon as the level 1 finished I completely shut down both machines, renamed the new one to have the same name as the original and rebooted it. As far as the users were concerned, total down time was less than an hour. However, the entire operation took most of a weekend, primarily because of doing the dump/restore across the network. If you have compatible tape drives on both filers you can probably speed up the processing of the level 0 dump/restore by using tapes. You probably will also be able to move your data a little faster than I did because you probably don't have as much data on your 230 as I had on mine. I had over 95GB of active data on the thing which if you do the math you will realize means that I had 13 active data drives, no hot spare, and no snapshot area. In fact the filer was so full that the first time I attempted to run the dump it aborted because there was not enough space left to create the mapping files that dump uses.