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We recently found out NetApp are not supporting 8.1 on the 3210 with Flash Cache installed

biescas
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Hi,

I have seen the TSB regarding this. Do we also have a CSB? I have received several questions from my partners regarding this. Do we have a more formal answer to the remarks below from one of our Partners?

Hope you are well!  I believe you are in next week to see us but I wanted you to get the key information down in an email following on from what I briefly mentioned to you at Insight and hopefully we can discuss then…

As we recently found out NetApp are not supporting 8.1 on the 3210 with Flash Cache installed, this is going to be a major problem for us and when I discussed this with some of the senior engineers at Insight (can’t remember their names but hopefully you can) they suggested the only option is to replace the 3210 with a 3240.

As a solutions provider we offer RDRS to our customers and being unable to offer Volume SnapMirror when specifying potential deals and restricting the options we can offer isn’t acceptable.  When we purchased the 3210 for our Cloud offerings this was to replace the smaller 2020 models which we knew were not going to be supported/possible to upgrade to OnTap 8, to find that the investment we made into a 3210 to satisfy this requirement is now insufficient is very disappointing.  We need to be sure we are able to offer our customers the best possible solution, not the only solution available to us because NetApp do not support 8.1 on the controllers we purchased.

Compression is also a new feature I believe we would greatly benefit from, we have a lot of SQL backups create by customers on our hosted platform which are replicated to other data centres using SnapVault but we are restricted on the number of snapshots that can be kept since the SQL backup files are huge and create a large amount of changeable data.  If we can compress the SnapVault destination volumes then we will be able to keep significantly more backups on disk.

We would like to know what NetApp are advising customers who purchased the 3210 with Flash Cache should be doing in a situation where they need the features of 8.1.

Regards,

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