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NetApp Insight 2023 – Event Rundown and Tech Updates

October 27, 2023 Judson McKratz Cloud, Storage

Before I start rattling off some tech updates to come out of NetApp Insight 2023 I wanted to start by rambling about the event in general. On the off chance someone who’s actually in charge of the event will swing by here. I know a lot of my colleagues will swing by here, and a lot will be on the same page. First and foremost, after being remote for several years, Insight back in person was fantastic. I got to meet friends and colleagues I haven’t seen in ages, and meet new folks I would’ve never spoken to otherwise. Everyone[…]

Cribl – A Long Ass Beginners Introduction

July 10, 2023 Judson McKratz Cloud, Monitoring, Security

Welcome to the first of what’s likely to be a series of blog articles about Cribl. Don’t know what Cribl is? That’s okay, neither did I a few weeks ago. It’s something I found very interesting and valuable, and those of you who know me personally recognize my need write things down as part of a self education exercise. Gotta do something to make roots in the mind an engineer pulled six ways from Sunday. So what is Cribl? Well I’m going to cheat and ask what ChatGPT thinks first… Me > Tell me about Cribl ChatGPT > Cribl is[…]

NetApp BlueXP – Setting up an on-premises Cloud Connector

February 15, 2023 Judson McKratz Cloud

Before you can roll up your sleeves and start using BlueXP from NetApp you need to set up a Cloud Connector. These are small virtual machines which run a myriad of containers to facilitate all the various bits and bobs that provide a connectivity foundation for the BlueXP feature set. Ideally, well, ideally if you’re using resources in one of the large hyperscalers (AWS, Azure, GCP) you want to deploy a connector there. That gives you the ability to use the Cloud Connector as, basically, a API and command pass through. Essentially allowing BlueXP to talk directly to the hyperscaler[…]

AWS and VMware Cloud go live with FSx NetApp ONTAP datastores – An introduction and guide

September 19, 2022 Judson McKratz Cloud, Storage

Recently, at VMworld Explore, VMware and AWS announced general availability of the much-anticipated integration of AWS’ FSx NetApp ONTAP NFS shares for use in their VMware Cloud virtualization stack. This article will cover the benefits and considerations so you can see whether it fits with your cloud journey. I tried to create a title for this post that wasn’t incredibly long, without using a metric ton of acronyms. Forewarning this post is going to be acronym heavy, even more so as usual, since we’re combining technical concepts across three acronym pushing tech companies. TL;DR VMware’s stack in AWS, VMC, now[…]

Deploying Azure NetApp Files – A Quick Guide

July 1, 2022 Judson McKratz Backup, Cloud

I wanted to write a quick guide on Azure NetApp Files in Microsoft Azure, with info on how the service works and how to deploy it. I say quick but ended up adding more technical details than one might say is required – that’s just he engineer in me. I hope you find this helpful and relatively straight forward. Azure NetApp Files – What Is It? Azure NetApp Files (ANF) is an Azure native deployment of NetApp’s ONTAP platform in their cloud environment. ANF is simply high performance file shares using NFSv3, NFSv4.1, SMB, or a combination. As part of[…]

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP – A Brief-ish Overview

September 2, 2021 Judson McKratz Cloud, Storage

Who is your daddy and what does he do? What is it? Amazon FSx is AWS’s managed services for filesystems. Basically if you want Windows File Server or Lustre out of the box – aka don’t want to manually setup and support those in your environment – you can use FSx to deploy an AWS managed environment. FSx NetApp ONTAP, FSx for ONTAP, FSx ONTAP, or FSxO (pick your preferred name out of a hat) is the same. It allows AWS users to provision NetApp’s ONTAP environment as a service managed directly by AWS. Dec 10 Update – The internal[…]

Compare and Contrast: NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP compared to Azure NetApp Files

May 5, 2020 Judson McKratz Cloud

It’s time for you to deploy in Azure. As part of your project you’ve got a bunch of NAS data you want to mange and present to various users and applications. You could stand up a virtual machine and install SMB services, but who wants to manage that? You could use Azure Files, but even Microsoft says Azure NetApp Files is the better solution. Then you got someone talking about Cloud Volumes ONTAP. Hopefully this quick article will give you the foundation to understanding the differences and decide which (or sometimes a mix) is best for your use case. For[…]

NetApp ONTAP Cloud in AWS – Full Deployment Guide

September 14, 2017 Judson McKratz Backup, Cloud

Intro Welcome to my quick guide on deploying NetApp’s ONTAP Cloud into AWS (Amazon Web Services). If you’re unfamiliar with the product, ONTAP Cloud is NetApp’s ONTAP software, as see on FAS and AFF equipment for many years, now available in AWS and Azure. By running ONTAP Cloud you can gain the same efficiencies and software features available on a traditional hardware platform in your cloud infrastructure. There are many benefits of presenting storage via ONTAP Cloud, such as using its deduplication abilities to lower costs and SnapMirror to easily replicate data between hyperscalers. Every ONTAP Cloud deployment starts with[…]