Unitek NetApp Training Blog

NetApp recently announced their direction on flash drives. The most interesting aspect of this was not just that they intend to support them, but that support will be implemented not just as plug in disk drives, but also as an extension of the WAFL cache.
One of the problems with spinning disk drives as we […]

Last time I began talking a little about qtrees. I described qtrees as a kind of mini volume or sub volume, because the have many of the qualities of a volume. Qtrees often seem to be a little controversial in class.
Many people decide not to use them, not seeing any particular advantage, or […]

I notice the subject of qtrees is often a source of confusion among students in my Data ONTAP Fundamentals classes. Part of this arises from the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, qtrees are unique to Data ONTAP and part of it come from the way they are often treated on Netapp’s […]

Since I come from a bit of a database background, I often look at storage performance through a DBA’s lense.  I looked askance at the trend toward ever large disk drives.  More spindles mean better performance and drive capacity has been growing much faster than performance.
In the database world, one of the ways we deal […]

Those of you who follow Netapp may have noticed the arrival of two new models, the FAS3140 and FAS3170.  These systems are interesting for a number of reasons, but the one that particularly caught my eye is the form factor.
For many years now, Netapp has offered systems in the lower part of their range that […]

Traditional volumes in Data ONTAP 7.0
In my previous entry I discussed RAID groups and aggregates in the context of flexible volumes.  For the sake of completeness, I am now going to discuss traditional volumes.  This should not be taken as an endorsement.  You should be using flexible volumes.  They have many significant advantages over traditional […]

In the course of teaching Netapp’s Data ONTAP Fundamentals course I have noticed that one of the areas that student’s sometimes struggle with are RAID groups as they exist in Data ONTAP.
To begin with, Netapp uses dedicated parity drives, unlike many other storage vendors. Parity information is constructed for a horizontal stripe of WAFL […]

For a change of pace, I would like some feedback from users of the new FAS2000 series storage controllers.
For those who are unfamiliar with the FAS2000 series, this is NetApp’s new low end solution, filling a similar role to the FAS200 “shrunken head” series systems.  These are systems whose electronics are actually housed in the […]

You simulator is now usable, but you may have noticed aggr0, which contained the root volume (/vol/vol0) is raid type RAID 0. This is a characteristic of the simulator as it comes from Netapp. However, just like a real Network Appliance storage system, it is possible to move the root volume. I […]

Your Netapp simulator is now operational. It has a name and an IP address and you should now be able to access it through Filerview.
If you go to your web browser and enter the IP address of your filer you should see something like this:

At this point, we’re interested in the entry “Documentation specific […]