Hi Brian,
Is there any reason to go with the QFE board besides port density (which I
don't
really need?) Are there plans to do FastEtherChannel on it?
As of DataONTAP Release 5.1, we support Cisco Fast EtherChannel (as well as other vendors' port trunking solutions) on our single FE as well as our QFE boards (or both). Please note that on the new F740 and F760 filers we support upto 3 individual 10/100BaseT NIC's *or* 3 QFE NIC's. Therefore, when you include the onboard 10/100BaseT NIC you have a maximum of 4 single Fast Ethernet interfaces or 13 Fast Ethernet interfaces using 3 QFE's plus the onboard interface.
OTOH, will the clustering software failover a filer if any one of its NIC's dies, and will that be support on both the single and quad NIC's?
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.
Please let me know if I can be of further help, -Val.
============================================== Val Bercovici (613)724-8674 Systems Engineer valb@netapp.com Network Appliance www.netapp.com Ottawa, Canada FAST,SIMPLE,RELIABLE ==============================================