Hi.

My name is Michael Homa and I'm a system programmer at the University of Illinois at Chicago. We have a single 740 which we use to contain university and department web pages.

We have six Novell servers that we use to service PC machines in our student labs. The servers contain home space and applications. We are considering replacing the servers with two or more netapps (we'd use the 740 and buy one or more additional machines - number of and model type are still in doubt). We'd put the home directories and applications on the netapp and let users access them via shares. We estimate that we would have approximately 3,000 sessions with as yet an undetermined number of both shares and open files. Of the 3,000, we don't have an estimates how many of these sessions will be active. (Since inactive sessions don't appear to be swapped to disk, the number of inactive sessions doesn't really matter.) The netapp folks send us the following information regarding models 740 and 820 (the two models we're considering):

740 820 ----- --- RAM 512MB 1GB Max Users/Sessions 7,200 16,000 Max Shares 14,400 32,000 Max Open Files 144,000 320,000 Max Locked Files 160,384 352,768 num_64mb 8 16

The formulas that they use are as follows:

740: maxusers = ((num_64mb - 2) * 1000) + 1200 820: maxusers = ((num_64mb - 3) * 1000) + 3000

maxshares = 2 * maxusers maxopenfiles = 20 maxusers maxlockedfiles = maxopenfiles + (num_64mb * 2048)

The formulas gives us an indication of what is permitted. But, they don't give us an sense of performance with such large numbers. Has anybody else tried to hang so many users off one or more netapps? If so, what kind of performance did your users see? The Netappliance folks haven't exactly overwhelmed us with the names of sites doing something similar on such a large scale. I'd appreciate any feedback. Thanks.

Michael Homa Academic Computing and Communication Center University of Illinois at Chicago email: mhoma@uic.edu