Judsonian.com – Page 2 – Tech notes from yet another random tech guy

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[…]

NetApp StorageGRID – Understanding Erasure Coding and Information Lifecycle Management

March 29, 2022 Judson McKratz 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[…]

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

November 9, 2021 Judson McKratz 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[…]

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[…]

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[…]