Well, its been a week, and as such I suppose time for a summary. Last week, I posted the following request for comments:
If you are a NetApp F630/FC-AL user and have encountered any (especially recurring) glitches with interactions between the Fibre Channel host adapter and OnTAP, or recurring FC hardware failures I'd appreciate hearing from you.
On the flip side, if you are a NetApp F630/FC-AL user and have seen perfect performance from your filer, I'd love to hear about it too.
I was surprised to get only 5 responses, one from a fellow considering buying one. Out of the four owners that mailed me, two reported flawless performance, one mentioned problems caused by extreme environmental conditions, and one reported RAID bugs similar to the ones I had seen.
Netapp replaced his shelf, as did they mine. I will post an update after we have the new shelf installed if there are any other notables. Their comment on the problem was "the low-level FC/SCSI system was unaware of a particular error sequence and was passing error codes to the RAID level where they caused a panic."
They also recommended upgrading to 5.0.2D4. There were some other FC fixes rolled into 5.0.2, I'm not sure if there are additional ones in D4.
Steve Clarke Steven.Clarke@ThePLAnet.net pointed out,
"It has been my opinion for a while that there are people at NetApp who can make things happen and others who just make the right noises but do nothing."
This has been my experience, too. However once I've been put in touch with the Clueful Folk, they have been dedicated above and beyond the call to resolving my issues. I've heard mumblings out-of-band about the usual low morale problems among their tech support staff and I sincerely hope that Netapp management recognise their amazing dedication.
Thanks to Steven Clarke, Matt Stein, Fritz Feltner and Graham Knight for their time responding to my post.
Alohas, matto
--matt@snark.net----------------------------------------------------- Matt Ghali MG406/GM023JP - System Administrator, interQ, Inc AS7506 "Sub-optimal is a state of mind." -Dave Rand, dlr@bungi.com