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NetApp Cloud Insights – ONTAP EMS Alerting & Dashboard Widgets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 in AWS – Full Deployment Guide

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[…]

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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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