On Mon, 23 Jun 1997, Dave Hitz wrote:
I believe that the "nuclear banana" color of the F220 was first used as the background of our web page.
Much as I love bananas, does Netapp offer a Bezel Trade-In Program? :) I would seriously pay some money to replace the faceplate of our F220 with a nice black or dark green colour. Then again, I suppose I could just paint the darn thing. ;-)
On a serious note: how much impact does the bezel have on airflow? Is heat much of a problem for the chassis? We don't have an internal tape drive, and I've removed the bezel off ours (the grey metal underneath matches the rest of our racks). Does it serve a cooling purpose, or is it just there for "looks"?
F630 ("large") New top-of-the-line server. About twice as fast as the F540 it replaces. (As the fastest box, it gets the cool metal bezel.)
Code-named "Mothra", I believe (to relate back to the Gozilla and Bambi names). :)
It turns out that board vendors frequently change components on their boards in ways that shouldn't affect anything, but which often do, especially at the high loads that NetApp filers generate.
The very same problem exists between DOS/Windows and Linux/FreeBSD on Intel hardware. Stuff that works great in a Microsoft OS mysteriously fails under a more robust and demanding environment. Not to say that you can't build a reliable, efficient Intel box, but you can't just go down to your street corner clone dealer and throw together any old components and expect it to work as a server.
- How do I shrink the filesystem on a NetApp? [Heck, I haven't
figured this out... only way is backup to tape, restripe the whole unit and restore from tape?]
I'm afraid that backup/restore is the only way. We've occasionally brainstormed about how we might teach WAFL to do this, but never come up with a clean solution.
Sounds like you'd have to do the equivalent of a "disk defrag" on the filesystem: compact all allocated data blocks to the smallest contiguous block that falls within a drive boundary. Yeah, it doesn't sound like there's an easy way of doing it without stopping all NFS activity on the filer while it rearranges the data.