Chris,

Actually your information is slightly out of date. The current GA release is 6.0.1R3. Not 5.3.6R2.

There are other 6.x releases available as well with different features added.

Click here to see what our current available releases are for an F740: http://now.netapp.com/NOW/cgi-bin/software?product=Data+ONTAP&platform=F...

And here to see what the terms "General Availability" and "First Customer Ship" mean: http://now.netapp.com/NOW/download/defs/ontap.shtml

When you go to the software download page you get to choose the platform you're using and then you can see the current releases available and some statistics on the number of systems/customers running each release and how long they've been running it.

Enjoy!

-----Original Message----- From: Chris Thompson [mailto:cet1@cus.cam.ac.uk] Sent: Tuesday, March 06, 2001 2:30 PM To: listsarch-toasters@enteract.com Cc: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Re: ontap 6.x

nlehrer@ibb.gov (neil lehrer) writes

is it time to adopt 6.x?

Of couse, that's an impossible question to answer in vacuo.

My feeling is that for those who usually run Early Access releases, 6.0 is increasingly looking like the place to be. We are planning to upgrade the F740 we use as the primary filestore for our (somewhat grandiloquently named) Central Unix Service from 5.3.7R1 to 6.0.1R3 at the end of next week, when the university term ends. I want the fast snapshots, but apart from that I want to be on the track where bugs are fixed fastest, and that's clearly 6.0 now.

On the other hand, the two F740's used by our mail systems have much more stereotyped usage patterns. They are currently at 5.3.6R2 (which is, after all, still the "Recommended Release") and it seems unlikely they will be upgraded before the summer, at the earliest. If you aren't pushing the edge of the envelope, in one way or another, there's no enormously compelling reason to move yet.

Chris Thompson University of Cambridge Computing Service, Email: cet1@ucs.cam.ac.uk New Museums Site, Cambridge CB2 3QG, Phone: +44 1223 334715 United Kingdom.