Category Storage

So, I’ve talked before about wanting to discuss the communities but not wanting to reveal information which isn’t exactly public.. Well, I’ve found a way to discuss this without an issue!

It’s called sadly.. Not logging in :) Yes, it is lame, but it works for me! So on to the communities!

At the high level it looks like this:

Which if you look around you’ll find a communities section with breakouts, Recent Content, NetApp TV and the top 5 discussions, documents and the latest poll!

Down a bit further (out of this section) you find Top participants, tags, recent blog posts and…. twitter!

So drilling down a bit we find this kind of stuff

This is a pretty straight-forward area, which provides indepth information for you to ask questions where you’ll get responses from both NetApp folks as well as other customers in the field with your same problem, questions or even solutions of their own!    We’re fortunate to have a number of followers (Internal/External) who monitor and moderate certain forums in order to provide their input into the types of things you’ll encounter out there!  The number of subjects is numerous and you’re always game to discuss any topic under the sun and get some good participation!

Occasionally, you’ll see new and updated Polls! Like this one:

It’s through polls like this where the user community can speak out about their configurations or situations to get a feel for what others happen to be doing.  In this particular poll it shows of the 15 respondants, 40% of them have NFS connectivity to VMware, which is certainly great for those considering NFS and were not sure who else was out there doing it.

And occasionally in the Recent area, you can get an exposure to just some of the types of questions being interactively asked – And who knows, I might even respond ;)

So be sure to check out those communities, check me out while out there as well! I’ll see all of the posts even if I’m not actively watching the site and my contact information is scattered there as well as the rest of the internets as a whole ;)

Take care getting your NetApp on and soon I will tell you how to do even more faster and easier with my other really cool planned things :)

So, I was logged in to the NetApp Communities this weekend (That’s right, I never stop working, or sleep…)

To tell you the truth, I’ve been rather inactive for some time, ever since I made it to “Master” level, was in the Top 5 (Was 2nd place, but have dropped in to 3rd place!) Oh, and one of my other projects kicked off consuming my time.

So, I was surprised to see THIS!

I’m not sure how long the NetApp TV link/videos have been out there, but I certainly saw it there!

This, and a few of the other ones are certainly interesting little marketing stories, but what isn’t a marketing story is the Communities themselves :)

Albeit I’ve been inactive for some time, I still receive every single comment, post or otherwise bit of information that goes out there (I’m so glad we have so many active employees and customers out there, so I don’t have to go through and answer every question myself! sadly I know that I would if I let myself :))

I actually wrote a nice post profiling all of the details of the NetApp communities back many months ago, and then squelched myself because I felt I was releasing too much information that might get my hands slapped, so I didn’t post it.  But nonetheless, this doesn’t seem like anyone will spank me over it!

You ought to check it out, because honestly I do check it out rather regularly, even if I’m not actively posting or commenting… I do read the few thousand emails from the communities which appear in my inbox weekly :)

For those of you who know me, I’m passionate.  Infact I’m a bit too much over the top “OMG I want to share this with you” type of passionate, which is why I convey a lot of the information that I do in the form of this blog.

For the longest time (since I’ve started at NetApp) There has been information I’ve wanted to share.    However, the NDA, Protective and other natures of me has prevented from really transmitting and transferring that “OMFG! This is sooo cool! You should know about it! It will make your life so much easier, faster, etc!”

Luckily for me! Some of those things which I find absoluteledly cool like you wouldn’t believe, I will be allowed to talk about! (Yay me! Yay you!)  so look forward to a series of segments on process simplification, some excerpts of my undelivered Accelerate training session (Which I still need to finish the full write-up of, for posterity) and a whole other series of cool stuff I absolutely love to talk about, especially when there’s noone to share the knowledge with!

Do let me know if there’s something in particular you want me to talk about and I’ll see if I can without getting into too much trouble! I honestly have had a whole slew of topics which I’ve self-squelched myself so as not to get into any sticky situations discussing things I’m not supposed to!

I’m looking forward to this!

It’s a dark night, you’re in a cold murky alley.   There’s a random file found in the root of your drive (or mount point).   Suddenly, your cluster goes offline.   WTF!

If you’re thinking, “Damnit, what did my storage vendor do now!” You’d be mistaken.

There’s this little doozy out there:

“A physical disk resource may unexpectedly fail or go offline when the IsAlive function is executed on a Windows Server 2008 cluster node” to the tune of Q953652

Microsoft declares it to happen when you meet the following scenario:

• You have a Windows Server 2008 cluster node.
• The IsAlive function is executed on the cluster node while a file is being accessed in the root folder of the cluster disk.

In this scenario, a physical disk resource on the Windows Server 2008 cluster node may unexpectedly fail or go offline. This behavior occurs randomly.

Or otherwise read as: If you have a file in the root of Drive letter or Mount point, the drive may ‘disappear’ when you have this configured in a cluster (This does not apply to Server 2008 single servers)

Quite often this is blamed on the storage (regardless of vendor) so be sure to keep your clusters up to spec and make sure to apply this Hotfix from Microsoft, especially if you meet this criteria!

Good luck Clusters, and those cold dark alleys won’t be so bad.

You ever get up and say “ooh! I want to find these TR articles!” Okay, if you don’t, *I* do :)

I certainly know a number of other folks who are always out there wondering …. Where do I find this?!?

Well, here is this little gem!

That’s right! all you need to do is click this Technical Reports: By Number link, and there you will have them all right there! I expanded it out to the “View All” feel free to manipulate as appropriate.