Look at WAN accelerator products, like Riverbed? ... View more

Are the "not assigned!" disks owned by the filer you are trying to create the new aggregate on, do they show as spares? ... View more

HI Luke There are two schools of thought here, one says how a separate aggregate for vol0 and the other says create one large aggregate per filer (within the limits of aggregate size / disk type / size). I'm definitely of the latter school, especially with so far disks relatively. Creating another aggregate per head is going to "waste" 4 disks and unless you going to be adding more shelves very soon could actually make disk access slower. ... View more

You can just restore a snapshot, assuming you've got snapshots turned on and the lun is the only thing in the volume. ... View more

A couple of other things to consider: The 2240 has limited expansion, a single slot per controller. It's a choice of either a dual-port 10GbE or 8Gb FC mezzanine card. You've 4 x 1Gb ethernet ports per head, bonding them together using LACP or similar might be a more cost effective solution. ... View more

Hi Once you create the snapmirror relationship and it completes the initial replication, the LUN will be there. What won't be there are the igroup settings. ... View more

My understanding is that it is presented to VMWare like an RDM not as a VMDK, If you don't need to use snapmanager for exchange then you could use VMDK's. This posting seems to confirm that  https://communities.netapp.com/thread/13932 ... View more

Hi Can't speak for v7 and  Exchange 2013, but I can relay some of our experiences with 6.x and Exchange 2010. Apologies. if I teaching my granny to suck eggs here. With regard to storage presentation; if you want to use snapmanager for Exchange you'll need to use Snapdrive. The choice is then to how to connect from the VM to the storage, the simplest way is running the MS ISCSI software initiator within the VM but this does have a performance hit, as with any other server application it's going to be dependent on what splice of the CPU it can get. If you present the storage to VMWare via ISCSI instead the connection is running at hypervisor level, much like it would with a fibre channel connection, this configuration works and is supported with the snap products. ... View more

Hi I think most Netapp users would favour reqqme914's advice over Henry's. My added advice would be, beyond the first 20 or so, only allocate the number of disks you need to an aggregate (ensuring they're at most 80% used/ allocated), Nothing's more annoying than having to a half empty aggregate on one head and being tight for space on the other. ... View more

To answer your first question, replicating NetApp to NetApp is building to the O/S although is licensed separately like many NetApp features. Replicating between NetApp and non-NetApp requires extra software, that you either buy one of the many vendors or you write it yourself in some scripting language or similar. To your second question: I wouldn't say there'd be problems, especially if you are sticking to products in NetApp's interoperability list. But I think anyone would acknowledge, the more different vendors in a solution, the more room for issues. Think I've helped you as much as I can. ... View more

Sounds like you are not really looking for DR, just off-site back up? If you just want back up, then all you need is some backup app software and some storage the other end. Then in a DR situ you go through a manual restore process to get back up and working. Of course the hardware on the DR site and any software needs to support all your platforms. With a NetApp snapmirroring to another NetApp that's guaranteed as it's block level replication. Using different hardware will make things more complex. If you want to buy IBM, buy the IBM hardware that's rebadged NetApp hardware! ... View more

Let me clarify. You'll need the VFM software (licensed by size of data now, I think) and a server or two to run it. You don't need DFS but if you have it VFM should be able to manage it and make DR switch over easier. Not sure if it can interact with NFS, you may need to look at DNS methods to achieve DR switch over here. ... View more

StorageX makes use of Microsoft DFS for some of the cleverer DR stuff, but beyond that no. ... View more

Simplest thing would be to have a NetApp the other end, this would enable the use of things like SnapMirror, but it doesn't need to be the same spec, a 2240 could be a good choice. Using non-NetApp hardware is possible, NetApp had a product called VFM which was a rebadge of Brocades StorageX. NetApp have EOL'd it, but a company has brought the code from Brocade, they're a bit low profile  http://www.datadynamicsinc.com/products/storagex-platform/ Bandwidth is going to depend on change rate and growth of data, Snapmirror is very efficient sending only changes at a block level, other solutions will likely be file based. Cross platform depends on how the storage is presented and what your DR system supports. CIFS / NFS shouldn't be a problem, LUNs could be more of a challenge, ... View more

The answer depends on many factors : What you are trying to achieve? What sort of systems you have? How much downtime you can tolerate in the case of an outage? How far apart are your sites? Unless there's NetApps both ends your options are limited, basically data back up using third party software and a lot of work. If you've a fat WAN pipe to the second site within 100km you could run synchronous replication, combine that with VMWare SRM or similar and you approach a near zero downtime solution. ... View more

No, having a second controller isn't going to help. I am assuming you using 8.1 in 7 mode, cluster mode could be different. If you've spare disks, at least 3, you could create a new aggr snapmirror your current vol0 to there, set it as the boot volume, kill you aggr, snap back etc, never needed to do it myself, but is meant to be fairly straight forward. ... View more

Is it your only aggregate on that head? does it contain the vol0 volume? If it is, it'll be like a fresh install so you would lose SSH access to filer and would need to use a serial connection or the SP port. You added disks to an aggregate but you can't take them away. ... View more

I agree, unless there's very different pricing in your region, the support costs for one year on a 2040 will be almost the same as a new 2240 with 3 years support. ... View more