Is there anything specific you want to know?

It's definitely fast and it scales not quite linearly. I'm using a 4 node 3050 cluster with HPO and striped aggregates.

Running GX on a filer will decrement your raw node performance versus Ontap due to the additional overhead of the cluster features. The drop is noticeable but it is quickly overshadowed by the striping.

The cluster namespace is very nice and if you're familiar with AFS you will be right at home. If not it takes a little getting used to, particularly if you want padded junction points.

Plan your striped volume layout. Striped volumes have their metadata in a single volume on a single node right now. They are working to fix this but what it means currently is that if you do extensive metadata IO you can actually hurt yourself using striped. By extensive I mean OLTP or the like, general purpose high performance usage does not seem to be noticeably impacted. You can create a striped volume with multiple segments such that if you add nodes later you can move some of the segments to the new nodes for better load balancing. But if you do not create the additional segments when you start, you can't do it later.

There are no NetApp data protection capabilities yet for GX besides snapshots. Snapmirror, snapvault, etc. are not supported and probably won't be for a while. Striped volumes can only be backed up over NFS; maybe CIFS too but CIFS support is also limited. Functional but not as much as Ontap. NDMP dump works on traditional flexvol's (who's used to saying that yet?) and you can do DR or LB replica's exactly like AFS does.

Jeff Kennedy QCT Engineering Compute 858-651-6592

-----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com

[mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com]

On Behalf Of grace rante Sent: Saturday, March 31, 2007 5:46 AM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: ontap gx

Heya,

Any ontap gx users out there? im interested in checking out the coral/file striping/HPO feature of GX and just want to check here first if anybody already had a chance to play with HPO and if you guys have any feedbacks...

thanks,

graziee