Storage – Page 2 – Judsonian.com

NetApp ONTAP – Protecting Against Ransomware

September 13, 2021 Judson McKratz Storage

First off, this post is thanks to my mate Charles. He wrote most of this up for his customers and I asked if I could snag it, throw my spin on it, and share it here. A lot of this comes from TR-4569, Security Hardening for ONTAP. That should be your go-to source for security on ONTAP. There’s also TR-4572, The NetApp Solution for Ransomware, which is sadly light on details and out of date. There’s also a pretty nifty video from Insight 2020 that covers a lot (I’ll even reference it later). This post is more ransomware concern forward.[…]

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[…]

A quick introduction to NetApp’s StorageGRID

February 20, 2019 Judson McKratz Storage

Before I go further it’s best to have an understanding of object storage. The analogy I hear quite a bit, and now tell myself, equates object storage to valet parking. Well, magical valet parking. Using traditional file storage is like using your average self park lot. You find a place to put your car, you put it there, and you’re responsible to remembering where you parked it and retrieving it for later. Object storage comparatively like valet parking. You drop your file off, get a ticket, and use that as a reference to for the valet to find the file[…]

NetApp ONTAP Cloud Licensing

August 17, 2017 Judson McKratz Cloud, Storage

If you’re looking to deploy an instance of NetApp’s ONTAP Cloud in AWS or Azure it’s important to understand the licensing models. Not only does it effect the size and performance of your instance, but it also effects your bottom line. Pay-As-You-Go Pay-as-you-go licenses are charged on an hourly basis along side the cost of running the instance/VM. The costs associated will appear on your bill from AWS/Azure. This license model is best suited for short term or smaller environments. You don’t have to associate your NetApp Support Site account but it’s highly recommended to get service support. License[…]

NetApp ONTAP Cloud in Azure – Full Deployment Guide

August 14, 2017 Judson McKratz Cloud, Storage

Intro Welcome to my quick guide on deploying NetApp’s ONTAP Cloud into Azure. 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 OnCommand Cloud Manager. OnCommand[…]

An Introduction to Unity, EMC’s New Storage Array

April 28, 2016 Judson McKratz Storage

EMC is rolling out a new SAN array lineup called the EMC Unity. At a high level the Unity comes into two main flavors, all flash and hybrid, and support fibre channel, iSCSI, NFS, and CIFS/SMB. It’s a mid-tier array, destined to supplant higher level VNXe arrays, and lower level VNX2 arrays. Specifically, the VNXe 3200 and VNX 5200, 5400, 5600, & 5800. As for right now I’m not aware of any plans to depreciate those arrays so if you’ve just picked one up or aren’t ready to jump into some cutting edge EMC tech then no need to worry.[…]

An Introduction to EMC’s DSSD D5

March 31, 2016 Judson McKratz Storage

Just when you thought EMC was done with alphabet soup acronyms and on to starting everything with a V or X along comes the DSSD D5. DSSD is a company acquired by EMC back in 2014 and their “D5” is an all flash storage array geared toward super IO intensive workloads. It’s new system that’s been in development for awhile so you may not see a lot of features you would find on other all flash arrays. Instead it’s been built from the ground up as a “go fast machine” that connects to Linux hosts via PCIe Gen 3.