I have noticed a trend when I talk to other netapp users, whenever I bring up "Widelinks" I get that "Puppy on a Dashboard" stare. Ironically that same response seems to flourish via support as well. I am not sure if I am the only person who bothered to use the technology, but I find it very useful to make our users lives a little easier.
For those that havent used Widelinks, they are a way of making a folder on a filer represent a location on a different volume, or even a different system altogether (CIFS ONLY). It actually uses a DFS referral to do the magic, but it is easier to setup than DFS.
One way we use widelinks is to present a single location users connect to i.e. \\filer1\data which actually has subfolders that are on a mix of FC and SATA storage. We have a \\filer1\data\archives that they can move data that is infrequently accessed, which is on a completely different system (an R200 nearstore), they dont need to remember a second path, or have another drive mapped for it. They just drag and drop from one path on \\rffiler1\data to the \\rffiler1\data\archives.
Another way it could be used is to have a central location for geographically dispersed data, we are thinking of using it for software installs where we create a folder for each of our geographic regions and then widelinking to filers in those sites so we can use the same path for all our documentation and package writing.
We have also used Widelinks to "migrate" cifs data from one system to another. I snapmirrored the data from one filer to another, setup the shares, and then renamed the source folder, created a widelink folder with the original name and pointed it to the new location. Users never even knew the data had been moved, downtime for the data was less than 5 minutes during a scheduled maintenance window.
I have found it helpful to use widelinks and hope you all do to, if you want to experiment with them there are numerous papers on the NOW site, and a tool called LN.exe that is useful if you arent unix oriented!
