I'm working for a customer that has multiple sites with various NetApp 22xx and 32xx systems, all in 7-mode.
They are looking at a new 3220 setup that would today be dedicated to a single task (a large Exchange 2010 setup), but within about a year would take on disks and load from an older 3210 system. I'm considering putting in the new 3220 in Cluster Mode.
The older 3210 is a fairly busy Snapmirror target; the smaller sites replicate a lot of their volumes to the datacenters as part of their offsite backup strategy. I know that today, "officially", 7-mode to cluster mode Snapmirror isn't supported but I also have read that with 8.2 it is used as part of a migration strategy.
If we go this way they will likely look at a long term plan to implement replacement c-mode systems at the sites over time to replace the 7-mode setups (ignoring the site 7-mode to c-mode migration stuff for now). Obviously if everything gets to c-mode all is well, but it may be 2 years before that would be reality.
Given that 7-mode to c-mode snapmirror is unsupported today, but it is physically possible in 8.2 (at least one-way), I'm wondering if Netapp is planning to officially support this at some point? If not, for anyone who has actually done any of these migrations, how feasible do you think it is to do 7-mode to c-mode snapmirror today? I've been told you can do it one way but can't go c-mode to 7-mode (which, based on what they are doing, would be acceptable).
