BareMetalMove, or whatever it's called now, worked very well a year or so ago and I imagine that your SE's can help you set up something along those lines with a back-to-back 100BaseTX-fd connection. FDDI also works quite well.

I seem to recall that we got about 5MB/s from a 1400 to an F330 over a FDDI connection. I'd be surprised if you couldn't get a fair bit closer to wire speed between an F540 and an F740.

It tooks us just over 1hour 20minutes to move our 20GB of data from the 486-based filer to the P90 - which I recall blew me away totally.

Now, I'm presuming you've got a maximally configured F540 (in terms of disk) which ISTR is about 300GB. 300GB, at 10MB/s (wire-speed on 100BaseTX-fd) takes about 9 hours. If it goes at 5MB/s it takes 18 hours. If you've got less *used* disk-space it takes less time.

ISTR that BMM makes a verbatim, swizzled copy of the filer so I don't think you lose snapshots or anything. The only thing to be careful of is the DOT version installed (being alpha - should be okey) on the new filer, and the network interface references in hosts and rc before booting it and getting going. Plus there was some slight untidiness in the final part of the BMM when I used it a goodly while ago - I think it needed to be booted without the contents of NVRAM or somesuch, which was fine because it wasn't actually normal fs data in there, though I'm probably misremembering totally now.

Doing this stuff over a normal network, or with either filer up and serving is a different, and slower, matter. You'd probably need to use ndmpcopy or something and that's a bizarre fish from what I've experienced.

On Sat 12 Jun, 1999, "Shaun T. Erickson" ste@research.bell-labs.com wrote:

While trying to get us through our crisis, they have also suggested that they may temporarily provide us with an F740, complete with enough fibre-channel disks to hold the data on our F540.

Sounds good - it'll go faster too 8)

We would like to know what would be the quickest way to get the data moved from one system to the other. Doing it accross our 100Mb net could take a couple of days, which is unacceptable. Could we put a scsi card in the F740, attach our F540's shelves and do volcopys? Any other suggestions? We need the downtime to be the absolute minimum.

You might be able to do that - but I'd keep the F540 integral so it *can* be fixed, and avoid importing weird configs into the machine your going to use to tide you over until the normal box is working again.

Also, if it's fibre-channel only, how am I supposed to attach my scsi-based DLT jukebox, so I can continue to back up the replacement filer via NDMP? Is there a scsi port on an F740, just for use by a tape drive?

SCSI connections to tape drives are still there. Upto two controllers with two drives on each tape chain IIRC. Fibrechannel tape controllers are not common yet, so your DLT will be supported for a goodly while yet.

-ste

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-- End of excerpt from "Shaun T. Erickson"