We've noticed that the 840 system board has room for 2 CPUs although it only uses one. (The second slot is occupied by a "dummy" CPU).
I've heard rumors that Netapp will be releasing another version of ONTAP which would make it possible to drop another Intel CPU and therefore improving performance.
Has anyone heard the same?
Nicolas Perreten Sr. Systems Architect Inquent Technologies Inc.
Nicolas Perreten wrote:
We've noticed that the 840 system board has room for 2 CPUs although it = only uses one. (The second slot is occupied by a "dummy" CPU).
Since the system is marketed as an appliance you are not intended to do anything under the cover. On the old intel based systems (F230) it was said that although you could upgrade the pentium75 or whatever and add more ram, doing so wouldn't help due to other bottlenecks. On the 840 I would guess that unless it has a switched memory/IO architecture then it will be PCI or memory bandwidth limited. If that is indeed the case then adding another cpu isn't going to give you anything, in fact it will may well end up in a slower, less reliable system.
On Sat, Dec 09, 2000 at 12:10:57AM -0000, Chris Good wrote:
Nicolas Perreten wrote:
We've noticed that the 840 system board has room for 2 CPUs although it = only uses one. (The second slot is occupied by a "dummy" CPU).
Nicolas: I've heard that NetApp may offer a "CPU upgrade" of some sort for the F840, although I was lead to believe this would be a faster CPU to replace the original rather than a second CPU. It has been rumored that a multi-processor filer is coming, so my opinion is that it is likely with a very uncertain time frame. =)
Since the system is marketed as an appliance you are not intended to do anything under the cover. On the old intel based systems (F230) it was said that although you could upgrade the pentium75 or whatever and add more ram, doing so wouldn't help due to other bottlenecks.
Chris: I disagree with your statement "you are not intended to do anything under the cover". Filers are computers, and just like every other computer, sometimes need to have cards replaced or added, memory replaced, or even a motherboard swapped out. Whenever we've got the whole PCB carrier sitting on a table top for some maintenance, we peer in at all the features of the components. It is pretty natural when looking at an F840 to say, "Look! There's a second CPU slot!", or "Dang! That NVRAM battery is HUGE!" You also have to expect that at some point during development, there was probably some reasoning that a second CPU might enter the picture or they wouldn't have gotten motherboards with the second socket.
Now doing your own hardware hacking (adding other CPU's, memory, peripherals, etc.) is definitely not recommended and I totally agree with that point since it will surely void your warranty or at least put you in bad graces with NetApp Tech Support. Sometimes it is necessary to push the filers a bit though. The only way to attach our DLT7000 (wide/diff) to the F330 (narrow/se) was to use a handy-dandy external Single-Ended/Differential SCSI converter from Paralan. Our SE at the time (yo Scott!) was doubtful, but it worked like a charm!
-- Jeff
-- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jeff Krueger, NetApp CA E-Mail: jeff@qualcomm.com Senior Engineer Phone: 858-651-6709 NetApp Filers / UNIX Infrastructure Fax: 858-651-6627 QUALCOMM, Inc. IT Engineering Web: www.qualcomm.com
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chris＠webtop.com -
Jeffrey Krueger -
Nicolas Perreten