Peter, Sorry to disagree, but you absolutely do not want to add a new A100 performance accelerator to the same SmartConnect Zone as other node types.  The reason is fairly simple, consistency.  If you have for example an application for editing large HD videos, the A100 is incredible about how fast it can pre-fetch a large file like that and stream it out to a client.  The trouble is that if your client is connected to a smartconnect zone that includes say 5 X200s and 1 new A100, then the odds are 1/6, or 16.6667 percent that they will actually hit the A100.  So one time in 6 the application's data access will be really fast, and the other 5 times it will be slower.  And if there is only 1  A100, what happens when it would reboot say for a code or firmware update?  What you'll see because it'll be the only node in the smartconnect zone is a complete outage for 2-5 minutes. So what can you do in this situation? Option #1, buy a second A100. (not cheap, but ultimately best) Option #2, Limit the number of IP addresses in the smartconnect zone to the number of Interfaces on the A100, (2x10Gbe=2 IPs, 1x10Gbe LACP lagg, 1 IP); then add in another node type as a backup.  Because there won't be enough IPs the other node will never service any client connections, unless the A100 is unavailable.  If that's the case client IO will be slower for the duration of any outage.  Make sure that you use a dynamic smartconnect zone and set the failback behavior to automatic.   Chris Klosterman Senior Solution Architect EMC Isilon Offer & Enablement Team
Hi Everyone,   I must install an accelerator node A100, and I would like if I must respect any best parctices (New smartconnect zone?), or, I can install (Physically) the node and only turn?  Regards,   Jérôme
A100 Best Pratices?