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A quick introduction to NetApp’s StorageGRID

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[…]

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NetApp ONTAP Cloud Licensing

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[…]

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NetApp ONTAP Cloud in Azure – Full Deployment Guide

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[…]

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An Introduction to Unity, EMC’s New Storage Array

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.[…]

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An Introduction to EMC’s DSSD D5

  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.

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