ONTAP Discussions

Data Ontap 8 for FAS3020

wyl8309173
8,658 Views

Is it possible we can have Data Ontap 8 series for FAS3020?

17 REPLIES 17

radek_kubka
8,593 Views

Hi and welcome to the Communities!

No, it is not possible - FAS3020 is a 32-bit machine & will not run 64-bit ONTAP 8.

Regards,
Radek

sshapiro
8,592 Views

Radek's iscorrect that FAS3020 is not and will not be supported with Data ONTAP 8, however the reason is not quite correct.

The reason FAS3020 isn't supported is Data ONTAP 8 requires more memory and CPU to run properly than the FAS3020 has.  Recall, FAS3020 first shipped in June 2005 and thus its design was locked down well before that.  This is way before Data ONTAP 8 as the merger of Data ONTAP 7G and GX was conceived.

Both 32-bit and 64-bit CPUs can be supported on Data ONTAP 8; in fact, the FAS2040 has a 32-bit CPU.  That said, Data ONTAP 8 does run better on 64-bit CPUs.

Skip

wyl8309173
8,593 Views

Thanks a lot for you professional explaintion.

radek_kubka
8,592 Views

Both 32-bit and 64-bit CPUs can be supported on Data ONTAP 8; in fact, the FAS2040 has a 32-bit CPU.

Hi Skip,

I stand corrected - I thought these days 64-bit CPU is needed to run any sort of modern code , but apparently it's not the case.

Regards,

Radek

cybercon_inc
8,592 Views

From what I heard, FAS3020 shipped with AMD CPU as well as Intel CPU, is that correct?

shane_bradley
8,592 Views

Not that i've seen, AMD CPU's in the 60x0 series.

From what i understand the XXX_setup_q.exe is the AMD code and XXX_setup_e.exe is the intel one

sshapiro
8,592 Views

FAS/V3020 doesn't have enough memory or CPU to run Data ONTAP 8 releases. Or won't be supported.

Skip Shapiro

tapped from my phone

timothycook
8,592 Views

If you've run the ONTAP8 simulator, the banner makes it very apparent it's FreeBSD (obviously there's been a lot of customization and it's not off-the-shelf FBSD).  That being said, I think it's fairly safe to assume any platform FreeBSD supports *could* be supported with ONTAP8.  Whether it will be or not is an entirely different story.

thomas_glodde
7,509 Views

FAS2040 has a 64bit CPU, its a dual core xeon. Ever since Pentium 4 back in the days, all Intel CPUs are 64bit. Even the FAS3020 CPU is 64bit if i remember correctly, but its just used 32bit. The limitation for the FAS3020 is 2GB of RAM only as well as its being a rather old P4 Xeon model or sth like that.

urbanhaas
8,593 Views

I never bought the 64 bit answer because the FAS2040 is a 32 bit box. I don't buy all the memory size answers either - the FAS2050 isn't supported, but the 3040 is. They have similar memory.

I don't work for NetApp and I don't have any official answer, but I can hazard a guess. As mentioned the port to BSD happened. I used to be a device driver writer for another company. While BSD UNIX should be great for having access to a lot of code for commodity hardware such as: Ethernet, FCoE, FC, etc, NetApp likely has to write their own drivers for certain pieces of hardware -- especially NVRAM and the IB connection on it. There are different versions or generations of NVRAM on the different systems out there. I'm guessing these drivers, as well as other specialized drivers for old built-in ports, hardware-specific items not found in the BSD kernel are the reasons. Also the older boxes were not likely commodity server hardware but more specialized.

Remember it's porting the existing driver, code testing, regression testing, testing some more for interoperability and then supporting, probably really costly on older boxes.

timothycook
7,510 Views

A 3040 has 4GB ram per head with a  dedicated NVRAM card, a 2050 has 2GB per head, 256MB of which are dedicated to NVMEM.  Not surprisingly, the 2040 has 4GB of memory per head.  There are minimum memory requirements whether you want to believe it or not. 

spence
7,510 Views

Short answer is NO. 2040, 3040,3070,31xx,60xx,62xx will support Data ONTAP 8.0

Chris Spence

Professional Services Consultant

970.214.8188 - Mobile

NetApp

www.netapp.com <http://www.netapp.com/>

NetApp Support

1.888.463.8277 or now.netapp.com <http://now.netapp.com/

cybercon_inc
7,510 Views

FAS3050 has 4GB RAM and 512MB NVRAM, same as FAS3040, but still no DOT8 support. So the decision isn't entirely technical.

timothycook
7,510 Views

Right... it was end of software support in 2009. 

rickymartin
7,508 Views

The 3050 did have 4GB of ram, but because of some oddities with the way that particular intel processor in it accessed memory above 3GB making it work with ONTAP 8 with reasonable levels of efficiency and performance would have been sufficiently challenging to divert the engineering resources away from other more valuable tasks. It's also worth noting that ONTAP GX was supported on the 3050, and the experience of doing so directly influenced the decisions to keep 4GB of RAM as the minimum for running ONTAP 8.

thomas_glodde
5,937 Views

FAS3050 runs with 32bit code only so the same happens as for any Windows 32bit PC with 4GB, you can only use around 3 to 3,5GB of RAM depending on your hardware setup. Its quite expensive to have proper mainboards to actualy do proper 32 bit + 1 bit extended adressing to use the real 4GB of ram.

Imho i think its ok to grey out the FAS2020, FAS2050, FAS3020 and FAS3050 as most of the boxes are quite old anyway and customers start to replace them anyway. and with that replace, you can go to a new machine with ontap 8.

thomas_glodde
5,937 Views

Not sure if you noticed:

FAS2050 = 2GB RAM

FAS3040 = 4GB RAM

Its more or less a RAM issue, FBSD gives a certain overhead for the "full blown" OS thus you need 4GB RAM at least.

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