[rescue] Auspex and NetApp

[David L Kindred (Dave)]

As the company have 2 and 1 of each, I guess it's time to share my
limited knowledge.

We have an old NS5000, and a not quite as old NS7000/250.  Both of these
are Sparc/SunOS based machines.  The 5000 has an assortment of disks
ranging from 1.3G to 9G, with one each Storage Processor, File Processor
and Network Processor.  The 7000 has 13 9G drives, and similar
configuration.

The backup scheme I inherited just used dump on the live filesystems,
making it as reliable (and unreliable) as dump anywhere else.  Although
we did some mirroring on the 5000, we have raid5 going on the 7000 so
you can't do the unmirror/backup/mirror trick.

Early in the life of the 7000 my predecessor tried using the Auspex CIFS
solution and abandoned it in favor of Samba.  I haven't tried any of
Auspex's CIFS stuff.  I don't know much about the hardware details as we
had them under support.  I do know that there some licensing issues to
watch out for.  (For example we 100Mbit I/F we had in the 5000 was
covered by a time-based license, so when we kept the machine running
past its supposed termination date that stopped working).  I can't help
anyone set one up, as I inherited these in a working state and just kept
them running that way.  Most day-to-day activity was really just basic
SunOS/Unix stuff, but we never really put a high load on the processors
anyway, so I never had to pay much attention to what the slave
processors were up to.

If you could stay pure NFS these systems were great, but were a pain for
the Windows stuff.  I'm not sure I'd want them at home due to their size
and power load, considering their small disk capacity.

We also have a new F810.  We have one DS14 disk shelf with 7 36G disks.
For backup we use an NDMP based tool, which does make a snapshot for
the backup.  The NetApp CIFS solution looks real good, as the Windows
guys just do their Windows stuff without a lot of pain.  And the NFS is
equally seamless.  Basically, the machine just works.  I haven't learned
that much about it since I haven't needed to!

BTW, the decision to switch to NetApp was based a lot on the published
financial data of the two companies, as the new Auspex units look like
they should get the job done too.  With that said, I'm much happier with
the NetApp than I ever was with the Auspex machines.

Some here was complaining about needing a special plug for something.
The old 5000 shipped with a 30A 120V connection, but if you look at the
back side of the power interface box you find multiple 15A connections
to the supplies.  If your box is like that you can away with using
multiple 15A connections by bypassing the power interface.  The 7000
just came with multiple 15A plugs, as did the NetApp.

-- 
David L. Kindred <mailto:d.kindred at telesciences.com>
Unix Systems & Network Administrator
Telesciences, Inc. <http://www.telesciences.com>
Support: <http://support.telesciences.com>
2000 Midlantic Drive, Suite 410, Mt. Laurel, NJ 08054
Tel: +1.856.866.1000 ext. 4184
Fax: +1.856.866.0185
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