Do you see any point in upgrading from a F840 to a F880 or F880c, besides the clustering factor? Does anyone have any good advantage point to this type of upgrade that would justify the cost.
Jennifer )
The F840 filer is only a single CPU system whereas the F880 has two processors. This is minor performance increase in Ops/Sec. I think it is from 20 to 25 Ops/Sec. So the question becomes do you need the increase performance or the increased capacity capabilities at the increase cost of the F880.
If you need 99.99% data availability from your storage, then a clustered pair is always the way to go either the F840C or the F880C. You will need to look at your needs. What is your data access like now and are you hindered by them? Look to how you might improve. Is the network the problem? If you are running few machines over 10Mb shared, then even an F880c will not fix the problem as that is not where the problem lies.
Matsushita Avionic Systems, looks like you might be heavily into an engineering environment. If this storage solution is to be used in a design environment, then I would strongly suggest the F880C. This will give you performance and growth capabilities -- trust me, you will need both.
-gdg
Jennifer Armenta wrote:
Do you see any point in upgrading from a F840 to a F880 or F880c, besides the clustering factor? Does anyone have any good advantage point to this type of upgrade that would justify the cost.
Jennifer )
Do you see any point in upgrading from a F840 to a F880 or F880c, besides the clustering factor?
On a related note, does anyone know how many pci busses are on the various 800 series? Infering from the expansion card installation guides, I'm guessing (hoping?) there's atleast two 66mhz/64bit busses, but it strikes me that you'd really need 3 to accomodate a nicely loaded filer (ie 3 fc-als', 2 gbits).
...and does the product-lit max of 3 fc-al adapters apply to a clustered config as well, or is the max actually 3+3? The docs aren't real clear (http://www.netapp.com/ftp/fseries_specs.pdf) for the 880c/840c "Max number of FC Loops -- 3", "Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop Disk Adapters -- 8 max". Huh? if the max loops was 4, it might make sense (leaving the remain 4 of the 'max adapters' for a dual-attach or CF setup).
While looking at this, I also tripped acaross the X2044A -- is it dual-loop or just dual-attach? In either case are there restrictions on it? I'm specially thinking of CF setups, where using the second loop for the partner disks would be nice, as you could spread your 'local' loops across a couple adapters, and only double them up in a failover condition.
Ugh. Not that I've got the budget to actually worry about it... ..kg..
ps. pir - could you please have the listserv reject the html-in-text/plain messages?
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Jennifer Armenta -
kevin graham -
Mr. G. D. Geen