I can certainly understand the desire to re-use the NetApp somehow.
They have a lot of great features for their niche (raw file serving),
and they are _very_ expensive. But, using it over NFS as the underlying
storage for an AFS fileserver is just asking for trouble.
Instead, the disks could be moved to a regular computer. If it's an
older NetApp (like in the 500 series) then the SCSI drives are fairly
standard. Ditto for the FC-AL storage shelves on the 700 series. I
haven't tried this, but you _should_ be able to just plug them in and
go. You won't get the shelf management stuff (failed drive warning,
failed power supply waring, etc.), which is a bummer.
You could still use it as storage for something else. The NetApp
website has some interesting papers on stuff like using a filer as
database storage. This sounds crazy, but the RAID4 + WAFL often has
better throughput than an OS's own local disk. This is because of the
missmatch between RAID5 and most OS's filesystems (ffs, ext2, etc.).
Good luck,
James Graves
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