We have an F85 and is has worked well for us. We just had an new SCSI card installed because of a recall and a tech. showed up on-site and made things painless.

We use mostly NFS, but some CIFS.

My only complaint would be that performance suffers when performing backups and restores with the single CPU. EMC touts that the processors  run seperate processes for Management and processing.

The F85 was 1/2 the price of the IP4700 and we had it setup in less than a 1/2 day.

-----Original Message-----
From: Barry Lustig [mailto:barry@lustig.com]
Sent: Monday, April 30, 2001 10:44 AM
To: Toasters
Subject: F85

Has anybody had any experience with the F85?  I'm most interested in the
hardware.  As a continuation of my last message, EMC is pushing hard
with an IP4700 against an F85.  They've been touting the reliability of
their box and that it has no single point of failure (2 processors,
etc).  I'd like to know if anyone on the list has deployed the F85 and
can give a reference on them.  Also, does anyone know what type of
failover the IP4700 is actually providing between their 2 storage
processors.  It doesn't look at first glance that the surviving
processor takes over the MAC address of the dead processor.  It just
starts arping for the IP address of its partner.

barry