On 11/06/98 16:54:16 you wrote:

Hi, we are considering going with one or more filers for our free hosting service. I've got some basic questions that I hope you all can help us out with. (I'll ask Netapp too whenever they return my voice mail..)

Most of these are already answered at least once, but what the hey, I'm bored. :)

Can you add drives to a file without shutting down?

Yes. And grow the filesystem dynamically to include the new drive, while still in service.

How would you add shelves/adapters?

Basically, you'd mount your new disk shelf in the rack, populate it with drives, shut down the filer, open the back of the cabinet, quickly slip in the adapter to the appropriate slot (if a new one is needed), close it back up, attach the cable from the shelf, and turn the filer back on. With a little practice the actual downtime of the filer for such an operation can be under 10 minutes. With the new FCAL, I don't know if you can add new shelves without shutting down or not.

Is the filer OS considered secure?

I would consider it pretty secure. There's not much on it. You have the same risks of sniffing packets as you do with UNIX or NT from another machine, but breaking into the filer itself is unlikely.

Y2K compliant?

Yes.

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

As far as the filer is concerned, yes. As far as other servers on the network, less so. That is, the uploaded CGI could compromise security on your web server on your UNIX box that is talking to the filer over NFS, but I wouldn't worry about the filer itself being compromised.

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

You could in theory. They may or may not work at first. Even if they appear to work, they may or may not work later when you stress them or encounter an unusual SCSI condition. And you'll get minimal support for running a non-standard configuration. So why bother? You may save a few bucks by using the 18GB disk you got at Fry's and some cheap memory, but once it starts failing in the filer because it's not tested by Netapp, you'll wish you hadn't.

If you really want to run something third-party, you may be able to make a special arrangement with Netapp. Talk to your salesperson.

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

As far as I know they aren't supported yet. When qualifying new drives, Netapp has to take into account not only the drive itself and if it can stand the load, but also the power concerns of the disk shelf. If the shelf can only handle half as many 18GB drives as 9GB drives, you haven't gained anything.

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)?

Raw bandwidth isn't a common measurement because rarely are you going to encounter the same mix of operations at each site. And it would depend on whether or not you're accessing the filer over CIFS or NFS, what version, how many drives you have, what kind of network, etc. Having said all that, I would say 40MB/sec or more is possible in a fully maxed out configuration. You mentioned used 100tx ethernet before. I would recommend using gigabit ethernet if you can, or going with multiple 100tx interfaces (full-duplex if you can).

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 anything about CFE or even if Netapp supports it.

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?

Within that system, there's no single point, but when you're talking about the overall service, you'll need to consider multiple sources of power, multiple networks and attached hardware, and so on.

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

I don't know about Frontpage, but all the others do/should work fine.

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

I think so.

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

This depends on the support contract. Again, I think so, but you'd need to get the details from your salesperson. Things may have changed. (Note that upgrades and fixes are probably free. Any release that provides major *new* features and functionality will probably cost you.)

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's always good to shop around, but I suspect the other vendors will make a lot of promises they can't keep, or focus on one particular area to shoot down the Netapp (it's slow during reconstruction, for example) rather than address all the other advantages or the deficiencies in their own systems. That having been said, I think EMC and Sun are both worth a look. You may find that for your needs, you'd like to have UNIX available to you on the NFS server. I used to like Falcon, but I haven't heard anything from them lately.

Bruce