Todd,
I cannot answer on behalf of our marketing group etc., but I would see a few obstacles:
1. Partner node needs to take care of both nodes activity in takeover mode, so it cannot be that much lower than other node. 2. We sell active-active clustering, so both nodes are active, and customer is not wasting his money for any passive protection. It leads you to the point that it may not worth the complexity to sell such a setup. 3. Technically, you must have same NVRAM size, and I believe you should also have reasonably close response times for any NVRAM mirroring and general underlying OS activity. That just makes non-equal nodes business more complex than one might think. 4. Anyway - customers reactions are always welcome here, and I'll run this to cluster devel. group, and see if they have to say anything....
Yours, Eyal.
---------------------------------------------------------------------- eTraitel - I'm the new eBuzzword around !!! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Eyal Traitel - Filer Escalation Engineer CNA, MCSE, CSA, NetApp CA
Network Appliance BV Holland Office Center Kruisweg 799b 2132 NG, Hoofddorp The Netherlands Office: +31 23 567 9685 Cellular: +31 6 5497 2568 Email: eyal@netapp.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Get answers NOW! - NetApp On the Web - http://now.netapp.com ----------------------------------------------------------------------
-----Original Message----- From: Todd C. Merrill [mailto:tmerrill@mathworks.com] Sent: Friday, March 09, 2001 6:11 PM To: Traitel, Eyal Cc: 'max chan'; toasters@mathworks.com Subject: RE: cluster using F740 and F760
From: max chan [mailto:maxchan0@yahoo.com]
Is it possible to use F740 and F760 as a cluster pair?
On Mon, 5 Mar 2001, Traitel, Eyal wrote:
No, sorry. This is unsupported.
Ah, but is it *possible*? ;)
You can put 1 GB of memory into an F740 to match the 1 GB in an F740. That is unsupported too, but possible. Ask me how I know.
So, what's the real reason why it's not supported, clustering two non-exact-but-in-the-same-family filers? Is there something technically preventing it? Is is a marketing/sales decision? Is it to protect the unwashed masses from their own stupidity?
Why not allow a lower-end filer take over a higher-end one? You're in a degraded mode in the first place during a failover condition, so why not allow a calculated risk?
Until next time...
The Mathworks, Inc. 508-647-7000 x7792 3 Apple Hill Drive, Natick, MA 01760-2098 508-647-7001 FAX tmerrill@mathworks.com http://www.mathworks.com ---
On Fri, 9 Mar 2001, Traitel, Eyal wrote:
- We sell active-active clustering, so both nodes are active, and customer
is not wasting his money for any passive protection.
I didn't mean to imply a passive failover, just an "unbalanced" one. For a long time, I managed an F740 and an F760 and would probably have clustered them if I could have. But, I had to wait until it was justified first for more power by upgrading the F740, and then later to get clustering as the last step.
It leads you to the point that it may not worth the complexity to sell such a setup.
Agreed, and I suspect this is a major reason why it isn't done. In my F740/F760 situation, it would have been bad to have a less sophisticated customer expect his F740 could handle being a partner to an F760. In my case, both were very busy, and to have more than 2x the load on that poor F740 would have been unacceptable...in normal operations. But, it would have been worth an acceptable risk for a degraded mode like this, with the reward being less downtime. Sluggish performance for an hour is usually better than zero performance for an hour. ;)
I think it's a nice-to-have, but not worth jumping up and down about.
Until next time...
The Mathworks, Inc. 508-647-7000 x7792 3 Apple Hill Drive, Natick, MA 01760-2098 508-647-7001 FAX tmerrill@mathworks.com http://www.mathworks.com ---
How about upgrade the F740 to F760? Is the spare kit for F760 good enough to make a F740 become a F760? or what should we need? Actually, I need to demo a cluster failover to my client. In my warehouse, we have a F760, F740 and cluster kit. We will purchase the required spare for this demo.
Max
--- "Todd C. Merrill" tmerrill@mathworks.com wrote:
On Fri, 9 Mar 2001, Traitel, Eyal wrote:
- We sell active-active clustering, so both nodes
are active, and customer
is not wasting his money for any passive
protection.
I didn't mean to imply a passive failover, just an "unbalanced" one. For a long time, I managed an F740 and an F760 and would probably have clustered them if I could have. But, I had to wait until it was justified first for more power by upgrading the F740, and then later to get clustering as the last step.
It leads you to the point that it may not worth
the complexity to sell
such a setup.
Agreed, and I suspect this is a major reason why it isn't done. In my F740/F760 situation, it would have been bad to have a less sophisticated customer expect his F740 could handle being a partner to an F760. In my case, both were very busy, and to have more than 2x the load on that poor F740 would have been unacceptable...in normal operations. But, it would have been worth an acceptable risk for a degraded mode like this, with the reward being less downtime. Sluggish performance for an hour is usually better than zero performance for an hour. ;)
I think it's a nice-to-have, but not worth jumping up and down about.
Until next time...
The Mathworks, Inc. 508-647-7000 x7792 3 Apple Hill Drive, Natick, MA 01760-2098 508-647-7001 FAX tmerrill@mathworks.com http://www.mathworks.com
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max chan -
Todd C. Merrill -
Traitel, Eyal