Dan,
We were hit by an interface link failures once last year. What options are there or will there be (either with or without Clustered Failover) to offer failover or redundancy for failed interfaces?
I'm especially concerned about this as we plan to transition from one or two quad fast ethernet cards on each filer to one or two gigabit Ethernet cards per filer.
If interface link failures are your biggest concern, I would stick with a Fast EtherChannel (or similar port trunking technology) configuration which unfortunately cannot be part of a NetApp cluster today.
If Gigabit must be in your short-term future, the good news is that NetApp clusters do support it and it sure is fast! The bad news (you knew it was coming <g>) is that we don't support multiple MAC addresses per NIC with our Gigabit drivers today and consequently you'll need at least two Gigabit interfaces (one active, one passive) per filer in a cluster config. Again, no word on when that will change.
Seems like 6 in one, half dozen in the other but at least you have some options.
-Val.
============================================== Val Bercovici (613)724-8674 Systems Engineer valb@netapp.com Network Appliance www.netapp.com Ottawa, Canada FAST,SIMPLE,RELIABLE ==============================================
-----Original Message----- From: Daniel Quinlan [mailto:quinlan@transmeta.com] Sent: Sunday, September 20, 1998 7:44 PM To: valb@netapp.com Cc: 'Brian Tao'; toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Re: Quad Fast Ethernet vs. Single Fast Ethernets
Val Bercovici valb@netapp.com writes:
Unfortunately, one of the things we don't automatically trigger a failover on in our first Clustered Failover release will be a "normal" interface link failure (OTOH, if a NIC fries its PCI slot, we will failover). Using a Cisco Fast EtherChannel across at least two interfaces would be a nice way to protect yourself from a single interface failure on a filer.
We were hit by an interface link failures once last year. What options are there or will there be (either with or without Clustered Failover) to offer failover or redundancy for failed interfaces?
I'm especially concerned about this as we plan to transition from one or two quad fast ethernet cards on each filer to one or two gigabit ethernet cards per filer.
Thanks.
- Dan