On Wed, 3 Sep 1997, Wayne D. Correia wrote:

|Hi, | |Are any of the NetApp 630 accessories like hard disks, disk shelves, NIC |cards, and RAM for the NetApp available via any other source than NetApp? |Their prices for the add-ins are quite high and I am trying to plan out a |system purchase now.

Kingston or Samsung dram Seagate F/W Barracudas Not sure what fast ethernet cards they use, but it would be trivial to find out.

Netapp *really* does its customers a disservice but its RIDICULOUS pricing on common accessories.

$1950 list for a F/W Cuda 4 from netapp...and they offered us this *incredible* 15% discount...wow $1657.50...

Tech Data had the same drive for $665.

I love our toasters, but someone in netapp marketing really needs to get a grip on reality.

Jonah

Jonah Barron Yokubaitis | Austin|San Antonio|Houston President | Dallas|Fort Worth|Boerne Texas.Net | Georgetown|Dripping Springs http://www.texas.net | Making 56k affordable

Hi,

Are any of the NetApp 630 accessories like hard disks, disk shelves, NIC cards, and RAM for the NetApp available via any other source than NetApp? Their prices for the add-ins are quite high and I am trying to plan out a system purchase now.

Quick responses really appreciated. :-)

-w

Wayne D. Correia 1-415-826-6000

OK my two cents worth:

1. Never Ever Ever buy 100T NIC from anyone but netapp. 2. If you are only buying one why bother? The trouble is not worth the cost. 3. If you don't have the in house expertise and contacts to figure out things like disk firmware, RAM types ect ect yourself you probably should buy from us. Because you are going to have to do some invistigation probably with an pci sniffer. 4. The 630 is brand new it has a new mother board, NVRAM card disk shelf and disks. This is not the time to twiddle with it. The 520, 230 and 220 have been out for at least a year so people who wanted to add there own hardware have already tried it and figured out what worked. This is sort of like human expmentation... it has to happen but you would rather have it happen to someone else. Given that we started shipping 630's a couple of months ago I am not sure I would trust anyones advice on substatutions that work until January.

Assembling a working system from "off the shelf" components is not as easy as it looks. Everyone is continually "improving" everything so two products that look identical can have wildly differing behavior. One of our big jobs is NOT changing things and this sometimes requires lots of effort (such as searching the wholesalers of the world for parts that have been EOL'ed). Unless this is your job or you have a lot of spare time I don't recomend it.

Sean

FYI: The first thing I did when I came to netapp was to look at the firmware levels of the disks in our performance lab. They happened to be pre-production freebees and were way behind the current shipping disks. I replaced them with new disks and the performance went up by 50%. Disk firmware matters.

Sean O'Malley Network Appliance Corp 2770 San Tomas Expressway Santa Clara, CA 95051 Phone: 408 367-3266 Fax: 408 367 3151 Email: sean@netapp.com