ONTAP Hardware

FAS3020s, should I upgrade?

HendersonD
2,310 Views

About 3.5 years ago we installed clustered FAS3020's in our data center and a single headed 3020 in our disaster recovery site. We use the production filers for file service, hosting exchangs and sql luns, and hosting about 35 VMs using NFS under vSphere. We use Snapmanager for Excange, Snapmanager for SQL, and Snapmanager for Virtual Infrastructure for backup and Snapmirror to send everything to our DR site. Overall we are very happy with this solution.

My school district is going out with a bond issue to voters in March and we get a chance to do infrastructure upgrades and other IT related projects. The suggestion was to upgrade to FAS3140's for two reasons:

1. I have a support contract for the 3020's but at some point given their age I will not be able to purchase support any longer

2. The 3140's are beefier and include 10gig ethernet

I am torn, how should I evaluate whether it is time to upgrade? I think I can get 10gig ethernet cards for my 3020's

2 REPLIES 2

roman_verysell
2,310 Views

Add a third reason (first in my opinion): FAS3020 is not supported in ONTAP 8.x

And I'm quite sure, 3020 hasn't enough horsepower for 10GbE (PCI-X bus and one old Xeon CPU)

HendersonD
2,310 Views

Over the next few years will OnTap 7.x go end of life as OnTap 8.x takes its place?

Public