FC SAN v.s. iSCSI/CIFS

NetApp file systems can be extended "on the fly" no hassles.
-G
"Benno..." wrote in message
...
Faeandar wrote:

On Wed, 07 Jan 2004 10:15:21 +0100, "Benno..."
wrote:


Faeandar wrote:

Thanks for the informative reply!


Also, I am a NetApp bigot. For all but the most specific applications
I think they work great. And the RAID 4 thing, what have you got
against that? ONTAP works very well and the benefits it provides in
ease of recoverability are winners for me.

As far as I understand from reading the NetApp documentation you're
limited in the number of drives you can add to one filesystem, this
limiting the size of the filesystem.
For the CIFS part of things I would like to have one very large
filesystem that contains al the Windows shares. Since this is not
possible I'll have to create several filesystems (that all need their
own RAID4 parity and hotspare drive).
So basically you have some of the same limitations of DAS (enough free
space in one filesystem and not enough in other filesystems and unable
to move the free space around to the other filesystems).
........Unless I completely misunderstand all of this.


I think you misunderstand. The volume limit on a filer is based on OS
revision. As of OT 6.4 a volume can be 16TB in size, and there is no
limit to a qtree size except that of the volume. So if you run OT 6.4
you can have one large volume. In fact, as far back as 6.2 the volume
size was 4TB so you could still manage it on an 825c.
In that volume you could put one qtree, which may be what you're
defining as a file system, or you can have as many as you want (there
is a limit but it's a high number).


Thanks I'll have another go at the documentation then.
However I do remember reading you can have a maximum of 14(?) disk in a
RAID set. What if you want to create a filesystem lager then that? Can
you create another RAID set and virtually add that to the filesystem
without the "backing up to tape, adding space, recreating filesystem,
restoring data" hassle?
Let's say I have created a 1TB filesystem that is used via iSCSI by a
Windows machine. In Windows this is formatted as one partition. I want
to add 500GB to that partition, can I do that without to much hassle?
What when I have a 2TB filesystem on the filer that contains all my
Windows shares (via CIFS). Can I just add new space to that without a
problem?


--
Benno...