topic Re: one chassis only? in ONTAP Hardware

one chassis only?

superderivatives — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 05:33:51 GMT

Hi,

The new FAS8040 single and dual controller configurations come in one chassis only.

I believe that this is not full HA best practices, and may not supply best uptime in case of chassis hardware failure.

(for example, we had, last week, a FAN failure that was caused due to sensor problem inside the chassis. The replacement required full downtime. Since we have 3240HA system with 2 chassis, there was no downtime to our clients).

The only solution I can think of is metro cluster. But this will require x2 disks (and controllers).

Please advise or share with me your input.

Thanks

Ariel

Re: one chassis only?

radek_kubka — Wed, 25 Jun 2014 16:59:45 GMT

Interesting question.

For a starter, I'm not a huge fan of single chassis architecture, either - it's kinda going back to 3100 series?

My understanding is that the 8000 series chassis is as passive, as possible with nothing to break really. Would be nice if someone from NetApp engineering team offers some assurance as well

Regards,

Radek

Re: one chassis only?

superderivatives — Thu, 26 Jun 2014 06:31:43 GMT

not sure what "passive chassis" is. but you must agree that every hardware can and will fail. MTBF is only statistics...

the only way to achieve full uptime is to have HA systems on different chassis. right?

Re: one chassis only?

radek_kubka — Thu, 26 Jun 2014 09:18:22 GMT

"Passive" means as close to a simple piece of metal, as possible, hence extremely unlikely to fail for whatever reason (rust? )

Dual chassis setup IMHO still has an advantage though, as cabinet-level resiliency can be fairly simply achieved.

However, 100% *guaranteed* uptime is a myth - an unexpected can always happen. We had cases of controller panics during an NDU ONTAP upgrade, which meant downtime on an otherwise perfectly healthy hardware.

Re: one chassis only?

superderivatives — Thu, 26 Jun 2014 09:35:02 GMT

well, for me this "new design" is a barrier.

i will defiantly consider other options (vendors) for the coming upgrades. unless NetApp will convince me that there is a good reason behind it.

[this is one of the reasons we moved from HP c7000 to Cisco UCS blades...]

Re: one chassis only?

parityerror — Fri, 27 Jun 2014 01:56:26 GMT

I'd also be interested to find out NetApp's reasons for single chassis architecture. We are currently assessing an option to perform an in-place controller replacement from FAS 32xx to FAS80xx, however we have each FAS32xx chassis in separate racks and we will need to compromise to move to a single chassis (either a huge outage to shuffle disk shelves, or put the controller in a 3rd rack and leave a few 3RU gaps in the existing racks).

Is there any news as to whether NetApp is considering releasing dual-chassis models in the near future?

Re: one chassis only?

radek_kubka — Mon, 30 Jun 2014 09:09:59 GMT

Well, there is FAS8080EX:

http://www.netapp.com/us/products/storage-systems/fas8000/fas8000-tech-specs.aspx

Needless to say, this doesn't help much anyone looking at 8040 or 8060...