Extra filer heads not only make great swap/failover boxes, but excellent on-site spares kits and test beds as well. As such, many of our customers are dropping NetApp's expensive hardware support on their F700's.........when they suffer a hardware failure, they can swap the failing part immediately; we then ship a replacement part that goes back into their failover filer/spares kit.
F720, 740 and 760 filer heads (without licensing) can be purchased for pennies on the dollar :-)
Scott
Scott Fischmann Union Computer Exchange, Inc. 6233 Idylwood Lane Minneapolis, MN 55436 email: scott@unioncomputer.com phone: 952 935 7282 | fax: 952 935 5056
"Helping our customers make each dollar go further -- since 1991!" www.unioncomputer.com
Subj:Re: a what if disaster recovery question? Date:1/6/2003 4:34:48 PM Central Standard Time From:<A HREF="mailto:rb@telenor.net">rb@telenor.net</A> To:<A HREF="mailto:DFinn@studentadvantage.com">DFinn@studentadvantage.com</A> CC:<A HREF="mailto:toasters@mathworks.com">toasters@mathworks.com</A> Sent from the Internet
Daniel Finn DFinn@studentadvantage.com writes:
What if we have a failure in one of the heads of our F760s? We have a
spare
F740 head, would we be able to just put that in place? Is the raid information stored on the disk or on firmware in the head? I'm mostly wondering what would happen to the data in this situation.
All relevant raid and firmware information is stored on multiple disks, so swapping heads is simple and straitforward.
I have never swapped from a "larger" head to a "smaller" head, but both heads are Alpha based, and it should work, atleast in theory, as the HW is is more or less equivilant, but there are HW constraints on max raw disk capasity, raw file system size, number of FC Host Bus Adapters etc. These factors may trip an apparent easy swap - though.
I have, on a couple of occations upgraded from F720 to F740 without much ado. Only make sure to edit /etc/rc file ahead of shutdown.
We keep a spare head for our F740s, but since the major load now is on F8xx (soon to add a FAS960c), we won't keep a spare F740 head on location anymore - not really important ...
If disaster recovery is important, I would suggest a 'spare kit' or as we do, service contract with a local agent with 24h delivery.
Also, are shelves swappable between F760s and F740s?
Definitely yes, with or without disks
>>>>><.rune
-- Rune Bakken Senior System Administrator Telenor Business Solutions (Nextra), ManagedServices/*/IP-Services Ph: +47 992 86 474