>>>I actually really like the NetApp model - its very easy to manage, very flexible, and the multi-protocol piece works >>>great for us. We have several hundred systems (mix of real and virtual) that use netapp as their storage in our >>>development lab. With Netapp, we can expose the same data via fibre channel, iSCSI, and NFS, so we can easily >>>distribute storage resources among the different environments. And the WAFL model is one that is >>>tried-and-true, in that its strengths are well-known, its weaknesses are pretty-well documented at this point (though >>>they've been mitigated in OnTap 7). Because of that, you can expect consistent results across different versions of >>>OnTAP, and different netapp hardware platforms. Compare that with HP, HDS, EMC, where different families of products >>>(of course) have vagaries, but there are even fundamental shifts between revisions within the same family. ...excellent post, Matt. Espousing technology for technical reasons. Now THAT is something I repsect! Do you think my sentiment about ASM on NAS (file mode) is off base? I can see how the ASM->iSCSI model would make a lot more sense. Thanks for pointing out the NVRAM point. So, have you ever had, say, a 4 node RAC cluster saturate a filer? What did you di to mitigate that condition ? -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l