a link to this article was posted here earlier this year. i'm taking the liberty to post it again for your benefit. not 100% layperson's terms, but i think it'll help you understand what NTAP's feature product does. and does well.
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Lighten Your Load
The NetApp F760 helps you off-load your file services and free your network storage
By Russ Iwanchuk
PC Magazine
December 14, 1998
A familiar scenario at a growing company: You are using a Windows NT Server for your users' network storage, and you need a machine to run your applications. If you run them from the file server, you risk overburdening the machine. On the other hand, if you decide on separate machines, you have the additional overhead of maintaining another server.
Network Appliance suggests you off-load the file services to one of its NetApp F700 series units, dedicated file servers--or filers. A filer looks just like any other Windows NT server on your network, has all the high-reliability and availability you could ask for, is easily administered, and performs impressively to boot.
The F700 series has three offerings, from the enterprise-aimed F760 to the workgroup-targeted F720. The high-end F760 we tested ($166,250 list) was equipped with a 600-MHz Alpha processor, 1GB of ECC RAM, Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, and four seven-disk hot-swappable Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL) arrays of 9GB disks, providing 232.2GB of storage at RAID 4.
Network Appliance offers SCSI disks for its filers, but you can get the most storage space by using FC-AL disks and arrays. The maximum number of 9GB FC-AL disks is 168, for a total storage space of 1.39TB. For those of you doing the math, the total space cited takes into account RAID 4--permanently enabled with the F700 series. Making them even more highly reliable, filers are rigged with hot- spare disks, redundant fans, and power supplies.
Beyond having an impressive hardware spec sheet, the F760 has excellent Common Internet File System (CIFS) integration, as well as support for Unix NFS clients. Under Windows NT, after you assign an IP address to one of the network interfaces (besides those mentioned above, ATM and FDDI are also available) and point the filer to your domain controller, the filer uses native Windows NT domain security for its user authentication information.
The filer appears in the Network Neighborhood as another Windows NT server, albeit a fast one with a lot of disk space, and administrators can share the volume using Server Manager. A filer can also impose disk quotas on users, a feature currently missing from Windows NT.
You can also take Snapshots (point-in-time copies of the entire file system), which are kept on the file system itself and can be made accessible to users.
We were impressed with the F760's performance: The unit turned out NetBench throughput numbers of over 140 Mbps with RAID level 4--close to the throughput results we got with Windows NT on a uniprocessor Xeon server running RAID 0. |
