[rescue] NetApp drives

[Skeezics Boondoggle]

On Tue, 31 Dec 2002, Steve Hatle wrote:

> I'm the proud new owner of a NetApp 630 (Mmmm - shiny chrome) with four SCSI

Congratulations on an excellent choice.  Definitely a sexy machine. ;-)

> disk shelves. I have the drive cans, but the drives themselves were pulled
> for destruction by the recovery house where I got the filer.

As long as you have the cans, you should be able to find plenty of drives
that will qualify.  The bigger problem is that without any disks you'll 
have to find a copy of ONTAP and an NFS/CIFS license... hope you're good 
friends with your local NetApp FE. :-)

> A couple of questions- I know my old NetApp 450 was picky about which drives
> it would talk to based on the SCSI ID tag. I assume the same is true of the
> newer filers. But- do the drives need any special NetApp firmware or other
> somesuch to work? Anyone have some appropriate NetApp drives (SCSI SCA) they
> would like to part with? The shelves I have are the STS2 with the
> differential converter. If I load up the shelves, I might need some power
> supply cans as well.

If you look in "/etc/qual_devices" (on any new-ish ONTAP release, or 
downloadable if you have a NOW account) you can see the list of drives 
that the filer will recognize.  It should also automagically update the 
firmware for you, too.

Here's a snippet from a machine running 5.3.7R3 (end of the line for the 
F300's and machines of that era; I think the F630 can run ONTAP 6.x?):

D  NETAPP  NTAP2770        e0cd
D  FUJITSU M2694ES512      8117
D  FUJITSU M2694ES-512     8117
D  FUJITSU M2954E-512      1661
D  FUJITSU MAB3045SC       1607
D  FUJITSU M2949E-512      1644
D  SEAGATE ST12400N        9072
D  SEAGATE ST12550N        0013
D  SEAGATE ST32430N        0000
D  SEAGATE ST43400N        0000
D  SEAGATE ST43400ND       0000
D  SEAGATE ST43401N        0000
D  SEAGATE ST43401ND       0000
D  SEAGATE ST43402ND       0111
D  SEAGATE ST15150N        0013
D  SEAGATE ST15150W        0011
D  SEAGATE ST15230N        0000
D  SEAGATE ST19171W        0017
D  IBM     DFHSS4F         1616
D  DEC     DSP3105S        T392
D  DEC     DSP3210S        435E
D  DEC     RZ28            435E
D  DEC     RZ28B           0003
D  UNISYS  003329ST15230W  0732

(I snipped out the obvious FC-AL drives since you said you have SCSI 
shelves.  Note that this isn't a complete list, but representative of the 
range of older 1-, 2-, 4- and 9GB drives that were supported.)

> Otherwise, any pointers/help on running non-NetApp drives would be
> appreciated. Google didn't turn up much of anything.

It's definitely "frowned upon" for any machine still under contract, but
since more and more old filers are starting to turn up in hobbyist's
hands, it is becoming more of an issue.  I've lobbied my local reps for
the establishment of a program for used hardware; while the company hasn't
yet made any noises about it I have heard privately from several of the
engineers and support folks who are tickled that people want to keep the 
older machines running.  I'd gladly pay a few bucks to be able to register 
an old filer and have a personal NOW account... as it is, I run a small 
farm of filers at work, so it isn't an issue for me, but... :-)

That said, I successfully migrated a shelf of Auspex drives (ST15150N's)  
with funky Auspex firmware to my F330.  I mounted them in the StorageWorks
cans, hung 'em off a Sun to reformat them, and then plugged them into the
filer - ONTAP then laid down the NetApp firmware and viola', they were
ready to go.  (The irony being that NetApp was initially founded by guys
who left Auspex...)

> The price on the 630 was attractive enough that I'm willing to do some work
> to get it functional. If I can't, at least I've got a nice 32U rack!

Uh... I'll pass on that one. :-)

> As an aside, I have a filer 1400 (rack mount, 486 based, works OK) that I
> could be persuaded to part with, if anyone is interested.

Was the bezel on that one brown?  Or do you have the "nuclear banana" 
yellow faceplate?

> The NetApp 450 is still humming away serving NFS for the rest of the house
> <grin>

Woo!  Yeah, my trusty F330 is working again; it's nice to have two extra
machines to pull spares from. :-)  The biggest problem is actually the
risk of "stiction" or other entropy-induced issues given length of time a 
filer typically runs - put your F630 on a UPS with decent runtime 
(depending on power quality in your area) and it'll run until doomsday...

Over the last two years the only time I've had to physically power down
machines was due to moving the racks around during an air conditioner
upgrade.  I was 13 days away from the second consecutive year of 100.0%
uptime and had to roll the racks out of the construction zone - about 20'
or so - while we took down a wall to expand the server room and roll in
the new air handler.  I could have almost done it, too!  I had a portable
2-ton cooler available, and a new UPS which was up on casters; if I'd set
that half the distance to the new location, unplugged the power cords from
the filer one at a time (how did we ever get by without redundant power?)
and plugged 'em into the new UPS, then gennnnntly rolled the racks...
Yeah, I didn't think it'd be much fun explaining how long it was going to
take to replace ~ 3 dozen disks and restore half a TB of data from tape
either. :-)  So, for CY2002 I had to settle for 99.9987% uptime.  Dang.

Anyway, good luck getting the F630 going.  It's a sweet machine.  Feel 
free to contact me on or off-list if you have questions.

-- Chris