When I started this site back in October of 2014, it was mainly to drive traffic to my NetApp Insight sessions -and it worked.
(By the way… stay tuned for a blog on this year’s new Insight sessions by yours truly. Now with more lab!)
As I continued writing, my goal was to keep creating content – don’t be the guy who just shows up during conference season.
So far, so good.
But since I create so much content, it gets hard to find for new visitors to this site, The WordPress archives/table of contents is lacking. So, what I’ve done is create my own table of contents of the top 5 most visited posts.
You can also search on the site or click through the archives, if you choose. Or, subscribe to the RSS feed. If you have questions or want to see something changed or added to the site, follow me on Twitter @NFSDudeAbides or comment on one of the posts here!
Just use the search field to look for words you want to read more about. (For example, search for “storage”)
Be sure to give us feedback (or if you need a full text transcript – Gong does not support sharing those yet) on the transcription in the comments here or via podcast@netapp.com! If you have requests for other previous episode transcriptions, let me know!
Tech ONTAP Community
We also now have a presence on the NetApp Communities page. You can subscribe there to get emails when we have new episodes.
Just use the search field to look for words you want to read more about. (For example, search for “storage”)
Be sure to give us feedback (or if you need a full text transcript – Gong does not support sharing those yet) on the transcription in the comments here or via podcast@netapp.com! If you have requests for other previous episode transcriptions, let me know!
Tech ONTAP Community
We also now have a presence on the NetApp Communities page. You can subscribe there to get emails when we have new episodes.
Welcome to the Episode 294, part of the continuing series called “Behind the Scenes of the NetApp Tech ONTAP Podcast.”
This week, we discuss how SnapMirror Business Continuity (SMBC) and MetroCluster over IP in ONTAP 9.9.1 helps maintain business operations through disasters, as well as when you’d want to use one over the other.
Joining us:
Manish Thakur, NetApp Product Manager, MetroCluster and SnapMirror Business Continuity (manish@netapp.com)
Cheryl George, NetApp Technical Marketing Engineer, MetroCluster and SnapMirror Business Continuity (cheryl.george@netapp.com)
For more information on MetroCluster over IP and SnapMirror Business Continuity:
Just use the search field to look for words you want to read more about. (For example, search for “storage”)
Be sure to give us feedback (or if you need a full text transcript – Gong does not support sharing those yet) on the transcription in the comments here or via podcast@netapp.com! If you have requests for other previous episode transcriptions, let me know!
Tech ONTAP Community
We also now have a presence on the NetApp Communities page. You can subscribe there to get emails when we have new episodes.
Just use the search field to look for words you want to read more about. (For example, search for “storage”)
Be sure to give us feedback (or if you need a full text transcript – Gong does not support sharing those yet) on the transcription in the comments here or via podcast@netapp.com! If you have requests for other previous episode transcriptions, let me know!
Tech ONTAP Community
We also now have a presence on the NetApp Communities page. You can subscribe there to get emails when we have new episodes.
Just use the search field to look for words you want to read more about. (For example, search for “storage”)
Be sure to give us feedback (or if you need a full text transcript – Gong does not support sharing those yet) on the transcription in the comments here or via podcast@netapp.com! If you have requests for other previous episode transcriptions, let me know!
Tech ONTAP Community
We also now have a presence on the NetApp Communities page. You can subscribe there to get emails when we have new episodes.
Welcome to the Episode 291, part of the continuing series called “Behind the Scenes of the NetApp Tech ONTAP Podcast.”
This week, we discuss VMware Tanzu, containers and how it all fits into the NetApp ecosystem with Myles Gray (@mylesagray) and Glenn Sizemore (@glnsize) of VMware and Chance Bingen (@CB8MyDataCenter) of NetApp.
Just use the search field to look for words you want to read more about. (For example, search for “storage”)
Be sure to give us feedback (or if you need a full text transcript – Gong does not support sharing those yet) on the transcription in the comments here or via podcast@netapp.com! If you have requests for other previous episode transcriptions, let me know!
Tech ONTAP Community
We also now have a presence on the NetApp Communities page. You can subscribe there to get emails when we have new episodes.
Just use the search field to look for words you want to read more about. (For example, search for “storage”)
Be sure to give us feedback (or if you need a full text transcript – Gong does not support sharing those yet) on the transcription in the comments here or via podcast@netapp.com! If you have requests for other previous episode transcriptions, let me know!
Tech ONTAP Community
We also now have a presence on the NetApp Communities page. You can subscribe there to get emails when we have new episodes.
Welcome to the Episode 289, part of the continuing series called “Behind the Scenes of the NetApp Tech ONTAP Podcast.”
This week, we discuss the latest news in the NetApp/Rubrik partnership and how Rubrik works with Ben Kendall (Alliances Technical Partner Manager, Americas at Rubrik, https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-kendall-6436609/) and PF Guglielmi (Alliances Field CTO @pfguglielmi) of Rubrik and Chris Maino (Manager, Americas Solutions Architects, chris.maino@netapp.com) of NetApp.
Just use the search field to look for words you want to read more about. (For example, search for “storage”)
Be sure to give us feedback (or if you need a full text transcript – Gong does not support sharing those yet) on the transcription in the comments here or via podcast@netapp.com! If you have requests for other previous episode transcriptions, let me know!
Tech ONTAP Community
We also now have a presence on the NetApp Communities page. You can subscribe there to get emails when we have new episodes.
ONTAP clusters utilize a backend cluster network to allow multiple HA pairs to communicate and provide more scale for performance and capacity. This is done by allowing you to nondisruptively add new nodes (and, as a result, capacity and compute) into a cluster. Data will be accessible regardless of where you connect in the cluster. You can scale up to 24 nodes for NAS-only clusters, while being able to mix different HA pair types in the same cluster if you choose to offer different service levels for storage (such as performance tiers, capacity tiers, etc).
Network interfaces that serve data to clients live on physical ports on nodes and are floating/virtual IP addresses that can move to/from any node in the cluster. File systems for NAS are defined by Storage Virtual Machines (SVMs) and volumes. The SVMs own the IP addresses you would use to access data.
When using NAS (CIFS/SMB/NFS) for data access, you can connect to a data interface in the SVM that lives on any node in the cluster, regardless of where the data volume resides. The following graphic shows how that happens.
When you access a NAS volume on a data interface on the same node as the data volume, ONTAP can “cheat” a little and directly interact with that volume without having to do extra work.
If that data interface is on a different node than where the volume resides, then the NAS packet gets packaged up as a proprietary protocol and shipped over the cluster network backend to the node where the volume lives. This volume/node relationship is stored in an internal database in ONTAP so we always have a map to find volumes quickly. Once the NAS packet arrives on the destination node, it gets unpackaged, processed and then the response to the client goes back out the way it came.
Traversing the cluster network has a bit of a latency cost, however, as the packaging/unpackaging/traversal takes some time (more time than a local request). This manifests into slightly less performance for those workloads. The impact of that performance hit is negligible in most environments, but for latency-sensitive applications, there might be some noticeable performance degradation.
There are protocol features that help mitigate the remote I/O that can occur in a cluster, such as SMB node referrals and pNFS, but in scenarios where you can’t use either of those (SMB node referrals didn’t use Kerberos in earlier Windows versions; pNFS needs NFSv4.1 and later), then you’re going to likely have remote cluster traffic. As mentioned, in most cases this isn’t an issue, but it may be useful to have an easy way to find out if an ONTAP cluster is doing remote/cluster traffic.
Cluster level – Statistics show-periodic
To get a cluster-wide view if there is remote traffic on the cluster, you can use the advanced priv command “statistics show-periodic.” This command gives a wealth of information by default, such as:
CPU average/busy
Total ops/NFS ops/CIFS ops
FlexCache ops
Total data recieved/sent (Data and cluster network throughput)
Data received/sent (Data throughput only)
Cluster received/sent (Cluster throughput only)
Cluster busy % (how busy the cluster network is)
Disk reads/writes
Packets sent/received
We also have options to limit the intervals, define SVMs/vservers, etc.
But for backend cluster traffic, we only care about a few of those, so we can filter the iterations for only what we want to view. In this case, I just want to look at the data sent/received and the cluster busy %.
When I do that, I get a cleaner, easier to read capture. This is what it looks like when we have remote traffic. This is an NFSv4.1 workload without pNFS, using a mount wsize of 64K.
cluster1: cluster.cluster: 5/11/2021 14:01:49
total total data data cluster cluster cluster
recv sent recv sent busy recv sent
-------- -------- -------- -------- ------- -------- --------
157MB 4.85MB 148MB 3.46MB 0% 8.76MB 1.39MB
241MB 70.2MB 197MB 4.68MB 1% 43.1MB 65.5MB
269MB 111MB 191MB 4.41MB 4% 78.1MB 107MB
329MB 92.5MB 196MB 4.52MB 4% 133MB 88.0MB
357MB 117MB 246MB 5.68MB 2% 111MB 111MB
217MB 27.1MB 197MB 4.55MB 1% 20.3MB 22.5MB
287MB 30.4MB 258MB 5.91MB 1% 28.7MB 24.5MB
205MB 28.1MB 176MB 4.03MB 1% 28.9MB 24.1MB
cluster1: cluster.cluster: 5/11/2021 14:01:57
total total data data cluster cluster cluster
recv sent recv sent busy recv sent
-------- -------- -------- -------- ------- -------- --------
Minimums:
157MB 4.85MB 148MB 3.46MB 0% 8.76MB 1.39MB
Averages for 8 samples:
258MB 60.3MB 201MB 4.66MB 1% 56.5MB 55.7MB
Maximums:
357MB 117MB 258MB 5.91MB 4% 133MB 111MB
As we can see, there is an average of 55.7MB sent and 56.5MB received over the cluster network each second; this accounts for an average of 1% of the available bandwidth, which means we have plenty of cluster network utilization left over.
When we look at the latency for this workload, this is what we see. (Using qos statistics latency show)
Just use the search field to look for words you want to read more about. (For example, search for “storage”)
Be sure to give us feedback (or if you need a full text transcript – Gong does not support sharing those yet) on the transcription in the comments here or via podcast@netapp.com! If you have requests for other previous episode transcriptions, let me know!
Tech ONTAP Community
We also now have a presence on the NetApp Communities page. You can subscribe there to get emails when we have new episodes.
Thoughts on Industrial Computing. Or sometimes economics or music or trail runnning or carpentry. Employee of Datto. Proud New Englander and Schaghticoke. Site is my own.
