Yup that will work just fine. You should watch to make sure the network cards are in the same spots as they are in your replacement head, or you'll be stuck trying to configure the nic on the console with only rdfile/wrfile to do it*. You don't need to worry about the disk HBA's at all, they can be anywhere allowable.

I witnessed this happen in production not long ago, with a 840 to a 960. Worked as smooth as anything. Of course that's only true if you maintain platform arch. Since the 840 is an Intel based system, and the 960 is an Intel based system it works fine. But if you have a 760, and you want to just attach it's shelves to a 960 and have it boot, there are problem since the 760 is an Alpha (DEC/Alpha 21164 proc @600mhz, 'cause I knew you were going to ask) under the hood, OnTap will have to be changed before it'll work. It's not impossible, just harder. But that's only if you have a 980 you want to be a spare for a 760, or visa versa. Probably not to relevant. But then, I'm rambling.

Whatever happened to the idea of partitioned nvram cards on the filer, with infiniband switches for something close to N+1 failover? Like, having 5 heads with 4 in production, the 5th is a hot standby that can be a cluster partner to any one of the 4 production systems. If one of the 4 nodes crash, that 5th head is available to do a CFO for that head. That'd be hot. Toss in a vixel (dumb)switch for disk connectivity...

-Blake *when, oh WHEN, will there be something other then 1980's concat type editor OnTap? Can't we get something like pico into OnTap one fine day?

On 9/29/05, John Jetmore jetmore@cinergycom.com wrote:

...

My company is working on upgrading our netapp infrastructure. At the moment we have quite a few F760s with a spare F760 head we can swap out if any of the others die. Someone today raised a question of whether the spare head had to be the same as the production head. That is, could we commit to buying anything from the 900 series lineand then use, say, a 980 to spare for a 960?

So the question boils down to, could I take the shelves off of a 960 and move them to a 980 and have it "just work"? I have my own guess on whether it would work but I though someone may no for sure or have tried it.

Thanks --John