We're using Netapp's here for email as well. (I just got finished deploying a good number of clustered units of 630's and 760's.)

My previous experience with Netapp was a F520 that was used behind a bunch of web servers. This box has been up for over 200 days with zero problems.

Now that I have my clusters out in the field (some of which are in semi-hostile environments) I've been having a few problems.

1.) Overheated F760 failed. Other filer took over, no serious outtage. This one happened to be in a non-data center environment and also had 4 old Sparc storage arrays in the cabinet next to it. We suspect the air conditioner was out in the room for awhile. My biggest gripe here is that I can't check the status of the power supplies in the filer.

2.) Intermitent failures regrading ISP_2100 resets to the other filers disks(the B loop). I'm still waiting to see if the hardware I replaced fixes the problem. (I've been having this problem for the last couple days.)

3.) One disk failure. I got an autosupport email and got an RMA disk in no time.

In all these cases, the fact that I've been running clustered systems has saved my ass. It's been worth the investment so far. If you can get the money to cluster, do it.

I have not had any really bad problems with poorly QA'd hardware as some of you have indicated. I've also never had to run wack. I've run into an interesting locking problem a couple times but nothing that isn't easily solved.

Aaron

On May 17, Andrew Hobson ahobson@eng.mindspring.net wrote:

On Mon, 17 May 1999 20:48:23 -0400, Jay Soffian jay@cimedia.com said:

...

Maybe we're just not a big enough NetApp customer. We have an F540, and F630 and an F740. None of them have ever given us the least bit of trouble.

We do have a goodly number of Netapps, but I suspect we have a different mix of NFS ops. Maybe our bugs are in a different part of the code. :-)

Of course, I'm more Netapps means more hardware, and more opportunity for foulups, but we've received cards that were bent so badly we couldn't put them in. The box didn't appear damaged at all.

Drew