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!
This week on the podcast, we’re talking ONTAP Analytics in the cloud and the new OATS product with a crew of performance folks including Greg Keller (@kellergc, Sr. Director, Performance Engineering), Matt Hambrick (Director of Performance Engineering) and Fred Peiffer (Performance Characterization Engineer/Architect). Find out how OATS is using existing performance data and machine learning to teach a system how to analyze and resolve performance issues, as well as how you can use OATS for your environment.
One of the cool things about Alexa is the ability to create programs and automation that ties directly into the device, such as controlling other devices connected to the internet.
One of NetApp’s software developers, Jungsook Yang, has taken Alexa and created automation for it to play the latest Tech ONTAP podcast episodes!
From Jungsook:
The podcast skill is live. The invocation name is ‘Netapp podcast’.
You can say, “Alexa, ask netapp podcast to start”, “Alexa, ask netapp podcast to help.” “Alexa, open netapp podcast.”
And say “Alexa, pause” or “Alexa, resume” to pause and resume.
Currently, the automatic feed doesn’t work, though. Until I fix that part, I have to manually update the code whenever a new feed is introduced.
Pretty cool stuff! The product is currently “beta” and will be undergoing improvements. If you have feedback, send it to podcast@netapp.com or leave a comment!
Keep in mind that native FTP support is not in ONTAP, so for the foreseeable future, use FTP VMs and CIFS/NFS shares. You can also use a similar approach to hosting HTTP data.
If you absolutely need native FTP/HTTP services in ONTAP, 7-Mode will be the way to go.
If you have any questions about the recipe, leave a comment here or on the recipe.
VMworld is right around the corner, so it’s a good time to remind folks about the goodness that is ONTAP + VMware.
ONTAP already has enterprise class storage for VMware, with support for both NFS and FCP/iSCSI on the same cluster to host VMware datastores. ONTAP also has robust support for VMware friendly features, such as VVols 1.0, VAAI, inline deduplication/compaction/compression, vSphere integration via the Virtual Storage Console, backing up VMs with SnapCenter, FlexClones, SRA plugins and much more!
ONTAP 9.2 went GA a couple weeks ago and included some nice new features that fit very well into virtualization workloads. When you upgrade ONTAP, you are able to do it non-disruptively, especially for VMware environments. Plus, NetApp’s internal predictive analysis points to ONTAP 9.2 having the highest quality of the available ONTAP releases out there, so there’s not a lot of reason *not* to upgrade to ONTAP 9.2.
Now, for those features…
Aggregate Inline Deduplication
If you’re not familiar with deduplication, it’s a storage feature that allows blocks that are identical to rely on pointers to a single block instead of having multiple copies of the same blocks.
This is all currently done inline (as data is ingested) only, and currently on All Flash FAS systems by default. The space savings come in handy in workloads such as ESXi datastores, where you may be applying OS patches across multiple VMs in multiple datastores hosted in multiple FlexVol volumes. Aggregate inline deduplication brings an average additional ~1.32:1 ratio of space savings for VMware workloads. Who doesn’t want to save some space?
At a high level, this animation shows how it works:
Quality of Service (QoS) Minimums/Guaranteed QoS
In ONTAP 8.2, NetApp introduced Quality of Service maximums to allow storage administrators to apply policies to volumes – and even files like luns or VMs – to prevent bully workloads from affecting other workloads in a cluster.
Last year, NetApp acquired SolidFire, which has a pretty mean QoS of its own where it actually approaches QoS from the other end of the spectrum – guaranteeing a performance floor for workloads that require a specific service level.
I’m not 100% sure, but I’m guessing NetApp saw that and said “that’s pretty sweet. Let’s do that.”
So, they have. Now, ONTAP 9.2 has a maximum and a minimum/guaranteed QoS for storage administrators and service providers. (Guarantees only for SAN currently) For VMware environments, storage administrators can now easily apply floors and ceilings to VMs to maximize their SLAs for their end users and customers.
ONTAP Select has been around for a while, first in the form of ONTAP Edge. In ONTAP 9.0, it was re-branded to Select and NetApp started adding additional functionality to extend the use case for the solution outside of “edge” cases, such as remote offices.
Select runs on a hypervisor, usually ESXi. ONTAP 9.2 added some functionality that could be appealing to storage administrators.
These include:
2-node HA support
FlexGroup volume support
Improved performance
Easier deployment
ESX Robo license
Single node ONTAP Select vNAS with VSAN and iSCSI LUN support
Inline deduplication support
Three of the more compelling bullets above (to me, at least) for VMware environments are 2-node HA, the ability to use ESX ROBO licenses and the vNAS support with vSAN.
If you’re already using vSAN in your environments, you’ll know that they don’t do file protocols like CIFS/SMB or NFS. Instead, they use a proprietary protocol that is intended to speak only to VMs. While that’s great for datastores, it limits what sort of tasks the vSAN can be used for.
With ONTAP Select running on top of a vSAN, you can present NAS shares to clients, host NFS datastores, etc, without having to buy new hardware. Not only that, but you can also present datastores via vSAN on the same ONTAP Select instance.
Starting with ONTAP Select 9.2, the ONTAP Select vNAS solution also supports VMware HA, vMotion, and Distributed Resources Scheduler (DRS). After deployment of a single-node cluster that uses external storage or consumes a vSAN datastore, the node can be moved through VMware vMotion, HA, or DRS actions. The ONTAP Select Deploy utility can detect these movements, and updates its internal database to continue normal management of the node.
This week, we invited the Storage Janitor/Undertaker, Andy Banta (@andybanta) and NetApp SolidFire Developer Advocate Josh Atwell (@josh_atwell) to discuss how the role of the specialized admin is evolving. We also chat about VVols and where NetApp fits into that technology.
Be sure to also check out the NetApp Pub for all the latest developer content!
Finding the Podcast
The podcast is all finished and up for listening. You can find it on iTunes or SoundCloud or by going to techontappodcast.com.
Also, if you don’t like using iTunes or SoundCloud, we just added the podcast to Stitcher.
This week on the podcast, we kick off a series of quarterly security update episodes to reflect the ever-changing security and vulnerability landscape. We cover WannaCry, Petya/NotPetya and basic security best practices you can follow to help protect against threats. We join some of the NetApp security team, including Kevin Ryan from PSIRT at NetApp (psirt@netapp.com) and Security TME Andrae Middleton (andrae@netapp.com), as well as esteemed NetApp A-Team member, Paul Stringfellow. Paul is the technical director at Gardner Systems in the UK. You can find his blog and podcast at https://techstringy.wordpress.com/.
Fun fact: Andrae really did lose a finger. He got it reattached and is on the mend.
Finding the Podcast
The podcast is all finished and up for listening. You can find it on iTunes or SoundCloud or by going to techontappodcast.com.
Also, if you don’t like using iTunes or SoundCloud, we just added the podcast to Stitcher.
ONTAP 9 is on a new cadence model, which brings a new release every 6 months. In May, we saw ONTAP 9.2RC1 release. Today, ONTAP 9.2GA is available here!
Generally, there are no feature changes between an RC and a GA release, but for 9.2, FabricPools add support for tiering from a SnapMirror destination volume in 9.2GA.
So there you have it! The latest release of ONTAP! Post your thoughts or questions in the comments below!
FlexPod SF was just officially announced at Cisco Live in Las Vegas this week! For videos of the event, check them out here:
This week on the podcast, we discuss the latest NetApp converged offering, FlexPod with SolidFire, also known as FlexPod SF! Join us as we welcome @vMiss33, Melissa Palmer, and NetApp SolidFire Product Manager Brett Siclair to talk about what FlexPod SF is and what it means for your next generation datacenter.
Finding the Podcast
The podcast is all finished and up for listening. You can find it on iTunes or SoundCloud or by going to techontappodcast.com.
Also, if you don’t like using iTunes or SoundCloud, we just added the podcast to Stitcher.
This week on the podcast, we chat with a few of NetApp’s Women in Tech about the Women in Tech program (@NetApp_WIT). In October, 2009, NetApp launched the Women in Technology group. Their mission is to support and foster the development of NetApp’s women by providing a forum for mentoring, networking, communication, and professional development. WIT is active in volunteer activities supporting women in our community, encouraging girls to study STEM, and helping those in need. There are currently over 900 members of WIT worldwide.
We invited WIT’s co-chair, Anna Schlegel (@annapapallona), as well as the RTP site leader, Fran Melia to talk about the program. We also brought in Sam Moulton, leader of the NetApp A-Team (@NetAppATeam), as well as Amy Lewis – the @CommsNinja herself – to discuss their unique experiences and philosophies regarding their experiences as women in tech.
Finding the Podcast
The podcast is all finished and up for listening. You can find it on iTunes or SoundCloud or by going to techontappodcast.com.
Also, if you don’t like using iTunes or SoundCloud, we just added the podcast to Stitcher.
In Epsiode 63, we spoke with FabricPool PM Arun Raman about what FabricPool was. This week, we invited the FabricPool lifeguard – John Lantz – to give us a deeper look at the cloud-enabling technology. We also welcomed ONTAP Senior Vice President, Octavian Tanase (@octav) and ONTAP’s Chief Architect, Ravi Kavuri, to give us the value prop and the business decisions that went into developing FabricPools.
Finding the Podcast
The podcast is all finished and up for listening. You can find it on iTunes or SoundCloud or by going to techontappodcast.com.
Also, if you don’t like using iTunes or SoundCloud, we just added the podcast to Stitcher.
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.
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