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NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP – Understanding Offerings, Licensing, Pricing, and More

Cloud, Storage

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. “All these different licensing tiers are confusing,” Judsonian heard someone say, as he shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of NetApp. “It’s like someone took a simple concept and set the difficulty to 11.” It was a Cloud voice and a Cloud joke. Simply put, NetApp’s Cloud Volumes ONTAP (CVO) is a simple great product. The licensing around it, well, that’s a lot more cumbersome. CVO – What is it? How is it licensed? CVO is NetApp’s ONTAP software running in AWS,[…]

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Deploying Azure NetApp Files – A Quick Guide

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[…]

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NetApp Cloud Insights – ONTAP EMS Alerting & Dashboard Widgets

Monitoring

Back in December 2021, NetApp’s Cloud Insights (CI) added support for ONTAP’s Event Management System (EMS) alerts. I don’t know how many possible EMS alerts there are but the event catalog is only a meager 2229 pages long. From what I understand the CI team worked with the ONTAP engineering team to highlight the 75-100 or so alerts are really impactful on a day-to-day basis. For this article I just wanted to quickly highlight how to check the EMS logs and show how to create simple dashboard widgets to display them. Log Explorer Now under Queries you can create and[…]

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NetApp StorageGRID – Understanding Erasure Coding and Information Lifecycle Management

Storage

Erasure Coding (EC) and Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) aren’t unique to StorageGRID. They’re ubiquitous to the object storage landscape, underpinning concepts like RAID and compression. Yet if you’re unfamiliar with the architecture these concepts might be confusing at first glance. The hope with this post is to cover these concepts, not only in direct relation to StorageGRID, but in a way that can apply globally. A Quick Intro to Object Storage Objects are a data storage methodology going back several decades. The general idea is instead of creating and maintaining a hierarchical file system the file/chunk of data/block is packaged[…]

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Intro to Autonomous Ransomware Detection and Mitigation in ONTAP 9.10.1 and Later

Monitoring, Storage

With the release of ONTAP 9.10.1 comes a new feature built into ONTAP, anti-ransomware detection. What it Does One of the concerns of a ransomware attack is the lack of visibility, which directly impacts response time. If ransomware kicks off overnight, or over the weekend it could be hour or days before anyone knows what happens. For archive environments it could be even longer with disastrous consequences. Anti-ransomware detection in ONTAP is built on file system analytics and uses “machine learning” to detect possible ransomware attacks on NAS. The first thing it’s looking for is whether the incoming data is[…]

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NetApp ONTAP – Protecting Against Ransomware

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.[…]

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Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP – A Brief-ish Overview

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[…]

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Getting to know NetApp’s Cloud Backup Service and SnapMirror Cloud

Backup, Cloud

I initially started writing this blog as an introduction and explanation of Cloud Backup Service by itself. I quickly realized that you can’t really understand Cloud Backup without talking about the SnapMirror to Cloud functionality now available in ONTAP 9.8. Bear with me and you’ll see what I mean. Oh, and for the sake of (relative) simplicity I will try and use full terms for each of the components I’m talking about. Though I may refer to Cloud Volumes ONTAP as CVO here and there. It’s bad enough that there’s multiple terms for the same functionality without adding “CBS” “SM2C”[…]

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

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[…]

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A quick introduction to NetApp’s StorageGRID

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[…]

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