Well, my migration of content between filers is complete and I have a few odd tidbits I thought I would share.

- ndmpcopy is an interesting (but frustrating) program. It is great to be able to kick off a dump piped to a restore on a remote filer via ndmp. level0's work well. The time estimates are pretty accurate (I got 30GB in 7 hours) if a bit slow. The irritating aspect of it is that ndmpcopy "hangs" after the completion of the program (at least when the source filer is 4.2a and the destination filer is 4.3.1) and the /etc/dumpdates file is not updated. This makes incrementals impossible.

- gnu find and cpio are your friend for incrementals. I did a level0 dump (with ndmpcopy) 2 days before my cut-over. The night of the cut-over, I did a find (with mtime -2) piped to cpio (-dump) onto the new location. It took under 1/2 an hour to do most everything. Had I parallelized the finds a bit more, it would have probably been around 15 minutes to complete.

Having completed the migration, here is what the before/after stats are:

before: f540/256MB ram/8MB NVRAM; 3000-4000 NFSops avg, 80-100% cpu util, 1 min cache

after:

f540/256MB ram/8MB NVRAM; 1500-2000 NFSops avg, l0-20% cpu util, 25 min cache f630/512MB ram/16MB NVRAM; 1800-2200 NFSops avg, 20-30% cpu util, 27 min cache

The f540 contains tools, logs and home directories. The f640 contains web content.

My users were immediately able to notice a significant speed improvement (we use alot of server side includes which lead to alot of IO) when dealing with certain areas of our websites.

I would like to thank Beepy (from NetApp) for helping me in this endeavor.

I hope might be of use to someone at some point.

Alexei