Is it time to upgrade my heads?

[owensherring]

Hi all, I have been tasked with finding out if we need to upgrade our current FAS3050c clusters but I am unsure if we need to or not.

Can anyone tell me what I should be looking for before we go out and spend a heap of money on something we don't need.

Thanks.

Message was edited by: Owen Sherring Not sure why I have added it to De-Duplication ;( Anyone know how to change it to Hardware... Ps. You can tell I am new here can't you.

[lausberg]

Depends, if you're hitting any limits or bottlenecks.

Performance would normally be one of the main reasons to upgrade or unable to expand due to limits of the platform.

New systems offer loads of benefits over the fas3050 range ... mostly all of the would however be expandability (e.g. 10G nics, pam modules, more shelves, larger drives, 4gb loops etc.)

Software wise you shouldn't worry that much, you can still run latest and greatest version of ontap on a 3050, you might however miss out on some features which are only available on 64-bit platforms (e.g. fas3x40/3x70).

-Robert

[owensherring]

Thanks Robert but I was looking for more of a "technical" stuff as in what commands ie. perfstat, sysstat, statit etc to run to give my peers some annalytical information.

Ta.

[lausberg]

Before you try to convince yourself or your peers for that matter to upgrade you first need to start with some sort of complaint or problem in the current environment.

Is the systems slow to respond, or are data transfers slow? -> yes you can run perfstat and open a case with netapp so they can explain if you systems is hitting its limits.

If you're systems is doing well coping with its load, upgrading won't guarantee it will be faster in the end.

Simply running a few command won't help you much, one would need to scope your entire environment to see where an actual speed increase could be be gained.

-Robert