I have a fairly small office (approximately 45 people) and perform GIS (geographic information system - ESRI ArcInfo) work, environmental modeling/database, reports writing, and other administrative tasks (email and web surfing). I am looking at the F720 fileserver (7-36GB drives, NFS, CIFS) to consolidate the $HOME and $PROJECT areas on my computer systems, and perhaps eventually the databases. The majority of my office is UNIX, but the number of PCs (as clients) is steadily growing. I am able to backup the UNIX boxes (servers) quite easily (~25GB), but the PCs are going to complicate matters.
I realize this isn't much information to go on, but for those of you who are currently using the F720 - overall, are you happy with the performance and is your operation similar to mine (or larger)?
How does your F720 respond to network traffic over the onboard 100-Base-T connection - is it a bottleneck?
Do you utilize the QFE option (four 100-Base-T board) and did you designate certain protocols (NFS/CIFS) or servers to a particular IP address (pipes)?
Do you now use the 1000Base-T connection - and how does/did this compare to the QFE option described above (if it was replaced)?
Do you have any experiences/recommendations to provide on interfacing the filer into the LAN?
How do your PC users (with local 10,000RPM disk drives) find the access speeds to their files on the file server - are they content or do they receive better performance having their data local on their drive?
I have pulled numerous documents from NetApps WWW server (haven't read them all yet). Any closing comments/experiences (things to look out for, or plan for, etc.) positive or negative on the F720 would be greatly appreciated?
Thanks, Loren