On Fri, 20 Jun 1997, Tom Yates wrote: Well, these questions probably haven't been repeated all that much, but getting answers to them would be a good start to a FAQ.

1. What is a NetApp Model XYZ? [Have a brief feature list and

product position summary for anything NetApp ever made, like the FAservers, the F220 vs. F210/F230, etc. Maybe we could get some anecdotes related to the choice of faceplate colours for the various filers ;-) ]

I believe that the "nuclear banana" color of the F220 was first used as the background of our web page.

One day Linda Henry (who chooses colors for web pages and filers) walked into my office, saw the nuclear banana background on my browser, and said, "Oh my God, that's really bright!"

The monitor on Linda's desk apparently displayed nuclear banana as a warm and gentle tone of gold.

It turns out that every filer color so far (except beige), is present in an abstract painting by David Hockney that I have in my office. Linda denies that there is any connection, but for anyone who is curious about upcoming filer colors, the painting also includes bright red, bright orange, sky blue, and white.

Here's what I remember off the top of my head.

First Generation:

These systems were all based on the EISA bus.

FAServer 400 The first box. A black tower tower unit. The systems units held 7 GB and could do 400 LADDIS ops/sec. (Hence the name.)

FAServer 450 Same box, but with a faster CPU. Maybe we also allowed the expansion cabinet (a second black tower) at the same time.

FAServer 1300 The first rack-mount system. Same basic electronics, but with rack-mount electronics and disks. (Boring Beige.)

FAServer 1400 Same again, but with support for hot plugging disk drives. (More beige.)

Second Generation:

The F220, F330, and F540 formed our first coherent product line. They were small, medium, and large, respectively.

We stopped using "FAS" in the name because it conflicted with the trademark for some company that made financial software (Financial Application Software = FAS). I like the simpler names better anyway.

They were released in the following order.

F330 The first PCI bus. The first bright blue bezel. (Code named Bambi. So named because we knew that Godzilla would crush it, performance wise.)

F540 Twice as fast as the F330. (Cool silver metal bezel with a sliding door.)

F220 NUCLEAR BANANA BEZEL!!! Ahem. This is a cost reduced F330 with fewer PCI slots, a slower CPU, and reduced (or eliminated, I forget) L2 cache.

Third Generation:

This is the first time that we've rolled our entire product line at once. In addition to small, medium, and large, we now support an extra small. They are the F230, F520, F630, and F210, respectively.

F630 ("large") New top-of-the-line server. About twice as fast as the F540 it replaces. (As the fastest box, it gets the cool metal bezel.)

F520 ("medium") Roughly similar in performance to the old F540, but inheriting the blue bezel of the F330, which was the previous "medium" server.

F230 ("small") Roughly similar in performance to the old F330 but with fewer slots and with a deep forest green bezel.

F210 ("x-small") A small non-rack-mount filer, colored black to invoke a nostalgic memory of the old FAServer 400 tower.

2. What third-party components can I use? [Product number and

vendors for drives, RAM, cables, shelves and canisters. Include suitable disclaimers that you may void your warranty or support contract, etc.]

This has always been a frustrating issue for me. When we first started NetApp, our goal was to let customers buy as many of their own components as possible. We didn't figure that we added much value to a disk drive or a PCI board (EISA at that time). (When we first, first started, we seriously considered being a software only company. I mean, PCs basically just work, right?)

We were confused.

It turns out that board vendors frequently change components on their boards in ways that shouldn't affect anything, but which often do, especially at the high loads that NetApp filers generate. We often find ourselves working with vendors to find failure modes at super-high performance levels that nobody else seems to reach. In an ideal world, vendors would always identify such changes with a new product number, but on this planet they sometimes don't.

Similarly, disk vendors frequently make changes to their firmware that shouldn't affect anything but sometimes does. There at least you always seem to get a new revision level, although there are sometimes other differences in quality -- like the amount of pre-ship testing that the drive vendor does -- that aren't reflected in part numbers or revision numbers. (Pop quiz: Do you think the disks at Fry's get the most testing or the least testing?)

Even with memory, which really ought to just work, it seems that there can be capacitance differences between lots that can cause bus loading problems if you don't check for it.

In any case, I think that there is a list of supported third-party components buried somewhere in the documentation, at least for disks -- which seem to be the most sensitive issue -- and possibly for memory, which seems to be the second most sensitive.

3. How do I shrink the filesystem on a NetApp? [Heck, I haven't

figured this out... only way is backup to tape, restripe the whole unit and restore from tape?]

I'm afraid that backup/restore is the only way. We've occasionally brainstormed about how we might teach WAFL to do this, but never come up with a clean solution.

Dave