On 6 Nov 1998 15:00:16 -0800, Brian Atkins brian@posthuman.com wrote:

hope you all can help us out with. (I'll ask Netapp too whenever they return my voice mail..)

Eh, it's friday :-)

Can you add drives to a file without shutting down?

Yes.

How would you add shelves/adapters?

You'd have to shut down for that.

Is the filer OS considered secure? Y2K compliant?

It's not a Unix system with lots of daemons that you don't need and that are just waiting to be exploited, it's a custom designed OS which is as far as I can tell very secure (unless you configure it not to be (hosts.equiv)). The latests 5.x.y releases are supposed to be Y2K compliant.

Would you feel safe running your filer attached to potentially hostile web servers running user-uploaded CGI programs?

Er? I mean the filer just holds data. If you allow some Unix server to mount the filer as root, and the Unix server gets broken into, then your data is vulnerable. The same goes for NT of course, but who'd want to run a web server with CGIs on NT? :-)

Can we use third party drives/shelves/canisters/mem?

You're not supposed to.

Works with these systems over nfs: http(apache), news(inn and dnews), dns(bind), mail(qmail), ftp(NcFTPd), Frontpage ?

As far as I know yes. I haven't tried qmail, but I've seen sendmail work (With locking) on filers.

Does Netapp charge for OS upgrades beyond a certain time period?

You get 3 months of upgrade and then you have to be under software subscription to be eligible for software upgrades. You may also be able to purchase them separatly.

Finally, do you feel there are any serious contenders to Netapp that we should check out?

No :-) but then, like everything else, it depends on your requirements.

Marc

+--- In a previous state of mind, Brian Atkins brian@posthuman.com wrote: | | Hi, we are considering going with one or more filers for our | free hosting service. I've got some basic questions that I

We use them for web hosting as well. We don't have quite the same customer base that Hypermart does, but it is still not bad :)

| Can you add drives to a file without shutting down?

Yes. Now, with fcal (fibre channel arbitrated loop), you can simply insert drives at your leisure. It used to be that you had to "quiet" the scsi bus when inserting drives.

| How would you add shelves/adapters?

With fcal you should not need to be adding shelves as often as you might have had to when using SCSI. I don't know what the correct way of dealing with shelf expansion is under fcal.

| Is the filer OS considered secure? Y2K compliant?

Depends on what you deem secure. It is as secure as you care to make it. If you export / without any permissions, then you get into trouble... :) I belive that NetApp is using the term "y2k safe" in reference to the filer OS.

| Would you feel safe running your filer attached to potentially | hostile web servers running user-uploaded CGI programs?

Yes. Snapshots are a true joy in this environment. You need to take some precautions, as with all web servers, but no big thing.

| Can we use third party drives/shelves/canisters/mem?

No, not really. With the fcal stuff, I would not mess around with 3rd party items. Others on the list may vehemently disagree with me.

| Will 18GB and larger drives work ok? (Seagate just announced | 36GB half-height drives...)

I would rather let someone not under NDA answer this one. The main constraint with the larger drives is power. Even though you can go out and buy these large drives now, there are steps NetApp needs to take in order to qualify the drives.

| What kind of real-world bandwidth can it put out (F740) ? I | see the transaction specs, but what about sustained mbits | in a web-type environment (3x more reads than writes)?

I have not put our 740 into real production yet, so I'll answer with what a f630 can do. At my peaks (in web production), I have seen the filer do 30MB/sec on disk IO and fill my fddi interface without any problems. I have not been able to max out my gigabit ethernet links (yet). This was with the filer doing around 9000 nfsops and 70% busy. Mind you, this was not our average day.

| If you use Cisco Fast EtherChannel, does it failover to the | lower bandwidth if you are using multiple network links ? | (assume a CF environment) ?

I don't know about how the etherchannel and CF works, but the current implementation does not allow for failover to slower speed links (as I recall from Paul's previous email).

| If yes, and assuming you are using CF with two filers, wouldn't | that be a system with no single point of failure, or is there | anything else we should worry about?

With CF, you pretty much eliminate all single points of failure *on the filer*, as long as you take care with the power.

| Works with these systems over nfs: http(apache), news(inn and dnews), dns(bind), | mail(qmail), ftp(NcFTPd), Frontpage ?

The filer does not care. It is doing nfs/cifs to the client that runs these applications.

| Does the CF cost extra? (for the software.. I know it takes a | second filer :-)

Yes. It is more than just software. I believe the pricing of CF is that of an additional protocol. Not knowing what list price is, I cannot answer what CF will be in your case. But you also need an additional car per filer: the NUMA interconnect card (over which the filers maintain state).

| Does Netapp charge for OS upgrades beyond a certain time period?

The whole software subscrition setup is a blur to me with multiple filers. The basic answer is yes, but someone from NetApp should give you the "official policy".

| Finally, do you feel there are any serious contenders to Netapp | that we should check out? Anyone tried the EMC Symmetrix stuff | or Artecon LnyxNSS systems?

It all depends on what you are looking for. NetApp has a wonderful product with great stuff coming. I have been using their products for over 3 years and would make the same choices again if I had to do it all over.

All of my eggs are in NetApp's basket. I sleep well at night :) Hope this helps.

Alexei

PS: Brian, I think you are local to me. Perhaps we can take this conversation offline and meet up somewhere? Let me know.