On Tue, Jun 02, 2009 at 05:04:29PM +0100, Peta Spies wrote:
You need more NICs (we hit this issue all the time).
Not necessarily. If you now have 2 NICs on both filers, simply VIF those NICs, then configure a vlan trunk over that etherchannel, and create vlan interfaces. Make sure to create interfaces for all vlans on both filers, so they can failover to eachother.
This assumes that your management network is actually just a vlan on the same infrastructure. If it's separate hardware, you do need more NICs
Ray Van Dolson wrote:
Gotcha. I'll just have to think about the RAID-4 vs RAID-6 thing then. Extra 300GB of space might be nice...
Don't. The extra headache you get when your performance goes down the drain whenever you have a high priority RAID rebuild, or the chance of data loss because there's a second failure during rebuild, REALLY outweighs the cost of a single extra disk. RAID-DP uses low priority rebuilds which take longer, but don't have such a big impact on your production data (unless you get into double degraded mode - which would have meant data loss on RAID-4).
Also, RAID-DP raid groups can be larger than RAID-4 raid groups, so you can more easily extend your RAID-DP based volumes (or aggregates), and if you do, RAID-DP is just as efficient as RAID-4, just vastly more reliable. It does add a little more overhead, but if you want raw performance, just use RAID-0, and recover from disk crashes using "newfs" (we do that - but not on netapp hardware obviously - and you'll have to add redundancy at another level).