Tag Storage

Hey, are you going to TechEd? Stop by and visit NetApp (and me! :))

Join NetApp at Microsoft TechEd 2009

Booth 417

Join us at booth 417 to discover how you can do more and store less with NetApp. Guaranteed.* See how our comprehensive portfolio of storage and data management solutions can help you reduce costs, reach new levels of efficiency, and increase data protection in your Microsoft environment.

You’ll also have the opportunity to meet with our executives and technical experts. Together, we’ll look at how our innovative solutions for Microsoft Hyper-V™, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server®, and Microsoft SQL Server® can help your company go further, faster.

In addition to learning about NetApp® storage and data management solutions for Microsoft environments at the NetApp booth, you’ll get a free NetApp t-shirt and a chance to win an Amazon Kindle 2 and a $200 Amazon gift certificate in our daily raffle. You’ll also be entered to win our grand prize—a $5,000 AMEX gift card!

If you would like to get more in-depth information on our innovative storage and data management solutions for Microsoft environments while at TechEd, fill out the form to request a meeting with our executives or technical experts.

Furthermore, the kinds of things which will be covered?!

NetApp virtualization solutions for Hyper-V:  Enabling customers to realize the promise of a flexible, scalable, and efficient data center by eliminating common challenges with storage provisioning and data protection encountered when transitioning to a virtualized environment.
NetApp storage and data management solutions for Microsoft Exchange:  Helping customers reduce costs, increase availability and simplify management of their enterprise messaging systems.
NetApp storage and data management solutions for Microsoft SharePoint Server:  Helping customers reduce costs and improve availability by improving ways of managing and protecting their data in collaboration portals and document repositories across the enterprise.
NetApp solutions for Microsoft SQL Server: Enabling customers to reduce costs and increase availability using our highly efficient, scalable storage and data management solutions.

NetApp Birds-of-a-Feather session

NetApp will be hosting a Birds-of-a -Feather session, “Gaining Efficiencies with Virtualization” on Wednesday, May 13^th from8:00 pm – 9:00 pm.

So, come on down, and I’ll be there as well! Feel free to tweet me, or find me around!

RamSan-20 highlights:

• 450GB Flash storage
• 120,000 IOPS
• 700 MB/s random sustained external throughput
• ECC and RAID
• Embedded CPU controller.

Wowza! this makes the Fusion-io solution seem like a ‘good try’ but Texas Memory Systems comes through again with amazing throughput and more!

Alright, crashing! but yowza! ;)

So seriously, if you haven’t seen this post by Steve or Val, well.. until things are released I cannot say much more than them! But once I can, you’ll get the motherload of it!

What can I say, which has already been said though…

For those of you who manage NetApp filers, you likely are familiar with the Command Line (CLI) or FilerView.   I’d like to say “Welcome to the change to that experience” and that change comes in the form of an MMC snap-in which looks a bit like this!

Believe me, if I didn’t fear for my own disclosure, I’d say more!

One of my favorite bits of this, is the fact that I can manage multiple filers from this single interface – Add them in and they’re ready to go.  The same can be said for multiple members of a cluster.  What? It knows who its cluster pairs are and can tell you about issues? no that’s far too cool to be true.

There’s so much more… which I look forward to disclosing when this officially launches, but just do know that it is really-cool and will improve your management experience even more-so than you currently have today!

I will say nothing more on this! :)

YES! Here on the Eve of the New Year, I am bring this super cool module to you!

Just a recap of the last Dashboard snapshot, the portion we’ll be addressing is Visualizations!

Once you click that little gem of a link you’ll be brought to a page which looks like this:

As usual I censored out the Filer name, Serial # and other things, but I did leave in some nice details.   Note:   based on latest loaded AutoSupport: 2008/12/27 06:00:00 PM -06:00

The reason I mention that is, you can run one Visualization report for say, December, and then pull one for November and then compare them for whatever reasons you need.

That single benefit alone makes it even more super cool ;)

At this point, click one of the objects in there (System, Disks, Raid, QTrees or Storage)

It will render the data and make it available to you: You can also export it to PDF of XLS

Time for a view of the System Tab:

This is the top portion of the System Tab.  Notice how it breaks things down as if it were an actual system, giving you details.  Something which you may not notice unless you hover are these cool popups (Popups do not function in Chrome)

System Options

Services

VIF3

And so on and so forth! You can hover over any object (Interfaces, Shelves, Loops) and it will provide you information which you’d normally spend your time scouring through sysconfig’s in order to find.  That little bit right there is pretty damn sweet if you ask me!

Now when you go over to Disks you get a similar picture:

And hovering over one of our disks gives us information like this:

Details of a Disk 

Now taking this journey along, we visit the Raid View of the Disks:

This one is fairly straight forward, same type of pop-up data – Very useful, but not really super exciting, unless you are looking forward to this specific data (I do at times, but at the moment, It feels anti-climactic with what is coming ahead! :))

Here is where it gets really cool (Part1) with Volume Logical Layout: QTrees and LUNS:

This is the first of the coolness! Below I’ve included something with LUN’s in it so you get that perspective as well.  

And last but definitely not least Capacity View! *Cheer!* Err.. :

While there are so many things I can hover over and get details on (When you hover it will ofcourse tell you information about the volume, settings, etc) I want to make a special focus on the one with the yellow border!)

Notice the “See Recommendations” That is amazingly cool, if you ask me ;)

A little click on that and suddenly you see:

Remember as I’ve mentioned this before, this is a suggestion of discussing your state and that you ought to look at it.  If it is part of your design to run something where you get a notice, that’s just fine! If you weren’t aware of it on a volume though, definitely worth investigating!

And that brings us to the end of the NetApp Premium AutoSupport Visualizations segment.   I’d like to note the export to PDF and XLS are very cool, however you do not retain that same level of ‘interactive popups’ in PDF format that you do accessing it via WebGui.   So, this is a pure case of What you See is What you Get – once you export out to PDF.  And when you export to XLS You don’t get any pretty pictures, but you do get all of the raw data that you would see in the Popups, so they’re very complimentary to each other, and your ability to present and manipulate the data!

Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this segment, I’ll be working on Configurations next so look forward to my next post!

Hooray! It is now time to drill into the Health Summary and Detailed Health check!

For those who remember the last Dashboard snapshot, we had a number of warnings and notices on this filer!

So, we’re going to drill down into the 12 warnings and 6 notices!

The Health Check Details will provide you with a number of “sections” which will provide a number of bits of information (You may have one or more of the areas I’ll be quoting out)

It all starts with the Health Check Analysis:

Very basic, straight forward and provides you with a timeline of what the recommendations are based upon.  This can be especially useful if you say “I fixed that!” you know when its referencing so as to not freak out!

Next comes System Level Warnings:

You’ll need to zoom in to see what kind of cool stuff there is, but I’ll zoom in for you in some areas I want to make sure you recognize.

That little bad boy there, oh my god, so cool if you happen to want to actually find out Why there is an error instead of knowing there is one.

So, if we click on that lun.offline message to figure out “WTF” is going on, we get this!

For simplicity sake, it showed us the exact error in the logs, showed us an indication as to why this happens and provides corrective actions on what to do!

There are other better examples of corrective actions (such as replace disk, unmap/remap luns, collect a trace) and so on and so forth to help you not only manage your system better, but come to better terms with the ‘warnings’ of your systems so you can be in better command and control of your own operations.

Next up is System Level Notices:

This is cool because it tells you something outright, and then provides you a link to a Bug Report on it, so you can follow the status especially if it applies to you!

Now this is cool as well, Volume Related Notices:

Note the disclaimer: These are based on conservative guidelines and may or may not be applicable to this system, but you should definitely know about it if you weren’t aware!

What I like about this, is it calls out specific volumes and discusses their snapshot usage, snapshot reserve and snapshot schedules (3 areas I find often accidently configured wrong and a hotbed of areas to clean up!)

And last but not least, another favorite area, Summary of Disks requiring Firmware Upgrade:

I personally hate playing guessing games of “Hmm, are my disks on the right rev? Do I need to upgrade?” etc, etc, etc… that same old story.  No matter how many types or different disks you have in the system, this Health Check will tell you the skinny.  

The only thing which would make this cooler, is Shelf Firmware Upgrade:

(I had to go to another filer to get this screen capture, because all these filers are current ;))

One of my favorite parts of this Health Check tool is that after I’ve upgraded and updated a system and I want to feel all warm and fuzzy about the work, I’ll go look at these details and make sure I’m not seeing warnings, notices, backrevved disks or modules, etc.

This not only saves me and my customers time and money at that moment, it also pays off dividends in the long-term.  Less work to be done to manage and maintain, less chance for unknown downtime because you know the EXACT state of your system at any given point.

The Premium AutoSupport toolset (This being just one part of it) opens the door to allowing you to not only self manage, but self-control and I’ll tell you – any system I’ve felt comfortable and confident in after building it, has never gone down.

It’s not magic, a special arcane craft or art form.   It’s clear conscious best practices and using the tools available to you, an ounce of prevention is worth an hour of downtime! :)

Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this segment, I’ll be hitting up Visualizations next so look forward to my delivery of that!

Disclaimer: The information above reflects only some of the type of notices you can receive.  If you do not see any of these notices on your system that is great! If you encounter additional ones (Aggregate Level Notices, Volume Related Warnings, etc) it is not a problem just an education of the current health of that particular system and should be reviewed.