A NetApp Technical Diary

It’s a busy busy time at the moment, hence the lack of recent updates. However, one very important thing I am currently working on is Movember.

This basically entails growing a stately ‘tash for the month of November in order to raise money for Prostate Cancer charity.

Please sponsor me by heading over to my Mo-Space page – http://uk.movember.com/mospace/13540

My Mo-tash after 2 weeks

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General

We are currently going through a fairly large project internally, and part of this is a “risk register” against the business. Now this includes a lot more information than just simply data on disk, but also people, reputation and so on. For me, now that I have started this project, that is a key part of data protection.

It’s an interesting topic, and something that I’d like to share with you at this early stage in my own project as it makes you look at the storage aspects in a different light.

What affects a piece of data’s risk class?

1.  Who has access to it?
2. How confidential is it?
3. Does it have a tangible value?
4. How portable is it?
5. Could it potentially damage the business reputation?
6. Is it protected?
7.   … probably a lot more!

Some of these are all questions we already have asked about the data sets as we need to define snapshot, replication and tape policies, but data protection goes a lot further than just this. Interestingly the Zemanta plugin for my blog has linked “data protection” with “Information Privacy”, which is a key point!

Who has access to it?

Not just from a front-end authorised point of view, although you do need to know this. Payroll for instance, generally it would just be HR and Accounting that have access to this, but is there a mechanism for anyone else to gain access to it? If so, is there any audit control to check who has been granted access, or who has gained access? The audit control is almost more important than the security in the first place. Security can and will always be broken, but if you can prove it was broken, then you can fix it!  Read more... (1078 words, 1 image, estimated 4:19 mins reading time)

General audit, business value, data protection, Information privacy, NetApp, Risk Analysis, risk register

I am actually quite proud of these. I did them awhile ago and I still refer to them quite a lot. The idea is simple, if you only configure a filer once or twice a month, the process might not stick in your head exactly and you may easily miss out a step. Rather than reams and reams of documentation, the idea is to have a couple of these pinned around your monitor and you have quite a quick visual guide on how you should configure things and it’s easy to keep to a certain standard.

I’m going to try produce more of these for various guides I do, they are much easier to understand quickly when you’re in a hurry.

The SnapDrive one here is a little dated, so please don’t hold that against the content.

General create storage, flow chart, NetApp, provision, visual

Well it was sort of inevitable, EMC have finally won the bidding war for DataDomain. So what happens next? This gives EMC industry leading de-dupe technology at last, and a real foot in the market. What will EMC do with DataDomain? Will they adopt the code into the primary tier storage and finally give NetApp a run for their money in primary tier dedupe? I’m hoping that EMC don’t consume DataDomain as they did with Avamar. DataDomain is a great technology in it’s place and it would be a shame to see it restricted to EMC only estates.

What’s NetApp’s next play? NetApp were very excited a month ago about this potential aqcuisition, so it must fall as quite a disappointment. I heard someone (not from NetApp) voicing the possibility of a Quantum purchase. That would be interesting and very comical as EMC have a lot of that technology in their products! But other than annoying EMC, what benefits would it bring them? Quantum are in a lot of trouble at the moment, so it’d probably be a cheap purchase all the same.

I guess this can only be good news for the consumer though. NetApp will be driven to improve and excel with their de-dupe technology, and maybe give VTL a much-needed make-over.

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General, NetApp News Data domain, DataDomain, EMC, NetApp

I have met a lot of people that have a fear of Operations Manager. I’ve had a fair play with this now, and once you get to grips with the interface and the thinking behind it all, it is actually quite straight forward. I did a quick guide for one of my customers who wanted to be able to schedule reports and also make some custom ones. This was based on 3.7, so I’m not sure how much this has changed recently, but I will try to update through later versions.

 Read more... (1949 words, 68 images, estimated 7:48 mins reading time)

General dfm, NetApp, operations manager, reporting

NetApp have kindly given me permission to republish their man pages here. They still need a little tidying up, but the sheer quantity means it’ll take me awhile to get them all sorted and cross-referenced properly, please excuse any visual issues for the moment. I wrote a quick parsing tool to get all the info on here, so there may be a few issues resulting from that still.

I’ve always liked the way that PHP have their function pages giving users the ability to comment directly onto them. This allows people to leave feedback on functions and tools, and also follow up with some extra uses or syntax for commands that aren’t necessarily clearly published. Hopefully this can feed back into NetApp to improve their documentation.

I’d definitely like to encourage people to comment on the man pages with anything that may be useful, and hopefully build this into a useful little reference section. Many thanks again for the NetApp folk for helping me with this.

General, Manual Pages commands, man, manual, NetApp, ONTAP

For obvious legal reasons, probably “The Valiant Young Toaster”

Image via Wikipedia

I’ve always quite enjoyed simple comic strips, Calvin & Hobbes, Dilbert, Farside and online ones like Penny Arcade. I have always toyed with the idea of creating one myself, but always lacked inspiration and artistic talent. I asked my good lady (who is very talented in the artistic department) to mock up a quick character for me, and I wanted to see what people think? I have a few ideas for plot lines and stories, but whether people are interested or not, it’s nice to have a creative moment aside from a technical day job!

But thought I’d post it here to get peoples feedback and maybe give me some encouragement to develop this idea a little more!

or Valiant Young Toaster

General brave little toaster, cartoon, comic, NetApp, valiant young toaster

This is meant as a very quick guide to installing ONTAP onto disks that do not have an operating system already, or destroying an existing set of disks and re-installing ONTAP from scratch. Remember that this process is very destructive, any data on any disks attached to the system will be completely wiped and re-initialised. If you have disks that you want to attach to this system, but they also have data you want to keep on them, please make sure you leave them detached from the system until you have finished the disk initialisation process!

You will need a console connection to the sytem for most of the process, I’d recommend for all of it to be honest. You will have a filer head, and a shelf of disks. If this is going to be a cluster and you have software ownership enabled, then I’d first get the systems connected to their own disks and get ONTAP installed before you complete the full cluster cabling or any HA cabling.

If you just need to upgrade the installation of ONTAP, checkout ONTAP Upgrades.

If the system does not have a base installation on the Compact Flash card already, then you will need to first NetBoot the system.

When the system boots, you will be prompted to break the boot sequence (either CTRL+C or any key), shortly after this and the system POST checks, it’ll start loading the ONTAP version that is on the Compact Flash card. At this point you will be prompted to press CTRL+C to get special boot options made available. You’ll want to be watching as you want to catch this prompt, so hit CTRL+C. When the system has finished it’s POST checks, you’ll be warned about the partner if this is / was configured as a cluster, agree to this so long as you are sure you are ready!  Read more... (478 words, estimated 1:55 mins reading time)

General, Maintenance Mode Commands 4a, N-Series, NetApp, ontap install, re-initialise, re-initialize

This is one of those annoying situations that can cause things to come crashing down when you least expect it.

Locked snapshots can happen for several reasons, the obvious ones are that they are the basis of a SnapMirror or SnapVault update (despite both relying on the snapshots, they will only actually lock a snapshot during an active transfer, you can happily delete the snapshots otherwise and this will destroy the replication relationship, more or less). They can also be because of a vol copy, or for a very brief period a snap restore.

2 of the less obvious, but more common reasons are that of a LUN Clone and a FlexClone. Both in principle are fairly similar, but in practice act very different.

Simply a clone will base itself on a snapshot and then create a sparse clone based on this snapshot, and as such the original blocks of data, hence using no data. The clone can then be split, but 99/100 it will be used for some sort of verification or reporting and then removed.

A LUN Clone is the one that causes us most problems. As said, it creates a clone based on a snapshot, but the clone is created within the volume, and only of a particular LUN. This is infact a very similar concept to that of the new Single File FlexClone available in 7.3. Based on a given snapshot, you will have a new LUN created within the same volume as the parent LUN. This will use no storage, and is great for running verifications, or possibly testing or even reporting.  Read more... (643 words, estimated 2:34 mins reading time)

General busy snapshot, FlexClone, locked snapshot, lun clone, N-Series, NetApp

Following some feedback (thanks @CXI), I’ve rejigged the permalinks. Sorry if this causes any issues, but please give me a shout if anything appears broken now.

Now just need to get round to finishing up some of the draft posts I’ve had for a couple of weeks. Busy times at the moment!

General