I can't vouch for whether or not a Filer's CPU can be upgraded but I can point something else out....
A 90MHz Pentium has an internal clock speed of 60MHz and a multiplier of 1.5 (60x1.5=90). On motherboards that allow configuration changes there are usually (at least) two jumpers, one for clock speed and another for the multiplier. A Pentium 133 has an internal speed of 66 and a multiplier of 2 (66x2=132 or 133). So, as you can see, a simple chip swap won't work (actually, it might work but without proper mother board support you'd still have a Pentium 90).
Regards,
Paul
-----Original Message----- From: Dane Jasper [mailto:dane@sonic.net] Sent: Thursday, February 04, 1999 5:09 PM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: NetApp CPU upgrade
Has anyone considered upgrading the CPU on their NetApp product? It's a closed product, so NetApp won't talk about it, but it seems to me that the Pentium 90 in my F230 (66mhz external speed, 90mhz core?) could be replaced with a Pentium 133 with the same 66mhz external speed without any need for jumpers, etc.
My NetApp is in heavy service, so I'm a bit hesitant. Has anyone tried this, or does anyone have a NetApp in light service that they'd like to try this with?
I've searched the listserve archive and don't see any subjects that would seem to have previously addressed this.
Somewhat busy CPU:
CPU NFS CIFS HTTP Net kB/s Disk kB/s Tape kB/s Cache in out read write read write age 24% 431 0 0 74 672 573 0 0 0 2 36% 639 0 0 149 1035 768 0 0 0 2 30% 524 0 0 129 708 639 0 0 0 2 44% 868 0 0 158 925 868 0 0 0 2 42% 857 0 0 179 734 560 0 0 0 2 37% 658 0 0 133 735 1069 0 0 0 2 29% 494 0 0 100 737 752 0 0 0 2 27% 459 0 0 80 834 724 0 0 0 2 44% 886 0 0 189 1078 668 0 0 0 2 53% 717 0 0 151 923 2249 35 0 0 2 86% 589 0 0 104 1050 2678 3423 0 0 2 28% 535 0 0 101 563 212 0 0 0 2 36% 712 0 0 133 654 244 0 0 0 2
Regarding cache age, this unit already has the full 256M of RAM, so we can't address that issue in the conventional way either.
On 4 Feb 1999 19:01:17 -0800, Benn, Paul paul.benn@netapp.com wrote:
I can't vouch for whether or not a Filer's CPU can be upgraded but I can point something else out....
A 90MHz Pentium has an internal clock speed of 60MHz and a multiplier of 1.5 (60x1.5=90). On motherboards that allow configuration changes there are usually (at least) two jumpers, one for clock speed and another for the multiplier. A Pentium 133 has an internal speed of 66 and a multiplier of 2 (66x2=132 or 133). So, as you can see, a simple chip swap won't work (actually, it might work but without proper mother board support you'd still have a Pentium 90).
This is correct, but you could look up the motherboard documentation, and find the clock jumpers. From what I recall however, back in the P90 days, chips were still using 5V (well maybe the P90, was the first Pentium to switch to 3.3V), and I'm pretty sure that motherboards back then didn't support faster CPUs, so I'm enclined to believe the netapp folks when they say that those systems can't easily be upgraded.
What you can do, is get a new motherboard (say an MVP3 based MB, with an AMD 350, and 512M of RAM), but I'd be willing to bet that it's not going to work because most likely the intel netapp code will barf on some unknown chipset (MVP3, PCI bridge, or god knows what else). Should you have an old netapp that you're truly not doing anything with, and don't mind taking apart, you can always try with a somewhat less recent pentium motherboard, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work. Obviously, you also can't expect to ever call NA about that system again :-)
Marc
Cwaeth Marc MERLIN:
What you can do, is get a new motherboard (say an MVP3 based MB, with an AMD 350, and 512M of RAM), but I'd be willing to bet that it's not going to work because most likely the intel netapp code will barf on some unknown chipset (MVP3, PCI bridge, or god knows what else).
That's actually quite true, though we didn't design that way just to thwart you. The platform-specific layers of ONTAP were written largely from scratch, and since we didn't have to be portable they are fairly closely adapted to the 82434NX (Neptune) chipset. This was quite the chipset in its day, but that was a couple of years ago and you can't find it in new designs. (I don't think it's giving too much away to say that a major motivation for the F720 was to replace the 200-series filers with something running a modern chipset.)
Also, the F200/F300 motherboard has some atypical PCI interrupt routing and a bunch of built-in devices (environment sensors, for instance) that aren't present on typical PCs. Finally, the PCI-based filers pretty much expect Open Firmware, which isn't generally available on PCs.
Should you have an old netapp that you're truly not doing anything with, and don't mind taking apart, you can always try with a somewhat less recent pentium motherboard, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work. Obviously, you also can't expect to ever call NA about that system again :-)
Um, yes, I suppose that would also be a consideration.
Mike Tuciarone Platform S/W Guy, Speaker-To-Firmware, Maker of Burnt Offerings to the Assembler God
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Benn, Paul -
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Michael J. Tuciarone