Shannon Madison wrote:

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Can you add drives to a file without shutting down?

yes. Our filers feature "hot swap" capabilities which allow the file system(s) to grow dynamically while online. There may be some useful links @ Network Appliance - Architecture

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How would you add shelves/adapters?

the same way you'd add them to any other system. Often, shutting down is _recommended_ but not necessarily required.

Interesting.. other posters have claimed a shutdown is required. Can anyone clarify?

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Is the filer OS considered secure?

At least as secure as an NT server when running CIFS, and/or a UNIX server running NFS, and quite often a bit more so (since the filer isn't running a lot of superfluous processes).

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Y2K compliant?

As of v5.1.2 of the Data ONTAP OS, yes. Look at: Network Appliance - Year 2000

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Would you feel safe running your filer attached to potentially hostile web servers running user-uploaded CGI programs?

Absolutely, as we won't run CGI processes on our filer.

I think you misunderstood... I mean if the nfs client machines have CGI running on them; CGI that could potentially do just about anything... Basically would you say it is safe or not safe to have a filer attached to the public Internet, or do you recommend that they be firewalled?

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Can we use third party drives/shelves/canisters/mem?

They would not be supported.

Need some clarification: so if we had a problem with our filer, would we still be able to get support/warranty service? I understand that if the problem was traced to third party parts we would be on our own at that point- but before that determination would we still get help?

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Will 18GB and larger drives work ok? (Seagate just announced 36GB half-height drives...)

We will soon be supporting 18gb drives. 36gb are in qualification. (I'm not sure if I'm really allowed to say that ;)

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What kind of real-world bandwidth can it put out (F740) ? I see the transaction specs, but what about sustained mbits in a web-type environment (3x more reads than writes)?

Brian Palowski (beepy@netapp.com) would be your best source for that (or some of the more frequent contributors on Toasters).

I have cc:ed him, hope that is ok. Brian, can you provide some rough estimates of how much bandwidth a F740 is capable of outputting? More than 100mbit easily?

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If you use Cisco Fast EtherChannel, does it failover to the lower bandwidth if you are using multiple network links ? (assume a CF environment) ?

If yes, and assuming you are using CF with two filers, wouldn't that be a system with no single point of failure, or is there anything else we should worry about?

(I'll pass on the CFO questions without more exact research)

If anyone can provide more details here, that would be greatly appreciated.

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Works with these systems over nfs: http(apache), news(inn and dnews), dns(bind), mail(qmail), ftp(NcFTPd), Frontpage ?

Our filer supports NFS, CIFS (SMB), and HTTP "get" and "head" transaction protocols, and SNMP, DNS, NIS, WINS, RIP, RMT, telnet, and rsh administration protocols.

What I am trying to get at with that question is whether those services (and particular software packages) have been shown to run over nfs. For instance, going through the mailing list archives I can see that you guys have done research on running Exchange on a filer, and I'm sure you have tested other software too.

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Does the CF cost extra? (for the software.. I know it takes a second filer :-)

yes :-) It also has added hardware.

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Does Netapp charge for OS upgrades beyond a certain time period?

"Software Subscription" is available (at an additional cost) after the expired warranty period.

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Finally, do you feel there are any serious contenders to Netapp that we should check out? Anyone tried the EMC Symmetrix stuff or Artecon LnyxNSS systems?

I'll leave that one to customers to answer. I'm sure there are a couple viable competitors (Sun, Cisco?) but do make sure you compare apples-to-apples. I've seen Sun benchmarks that blow us out of the water, but it turns out they're using what would have to be a non-real-world $2million system against our $60k system.

hope that helps. I'm sure you'll get lots of other responses as well. Let me know if you need more follow-up on the CFO stuff.

-Shannon

Thanks for the responses I've gotten so far!

-- Shannon Madison shannon@netapp.com

Network Appliance, Inc. 2770 San Tomas Expressway Santa Clara, CA 95051 USA

Work: (408) 367-3574 Fax: (408) 367-2151

The usual disclaimers apply.