Netapp

NetApp has offered Data ONTAP for some time in two flavours:

• 7-Mode
• Clustered Data ONTAP (cDOT)

With cDOT, NetApp has rewritten ONTAP nearly from scratch. The aim was to create an Storage OS, that leverages scale-out architecture and storage virtualization techniques, as well as providing non-disruptive operations. NetApp has needed some release cycles to get cDOT at that point, where it provides all features that customers know from 7-Mode. With Data ONTAP 8.3, NetApp has reached this point. Even Metrocluster is now supported. That’s a huge improvement and I’m glad that NetApp has made it. But NetApp wasted no time in cutting off old habits: With ONTAP 8.3, 7-Mode is no longer offered. Okay, no big deal. Customers can migrate from 7-Mode to cDOT. Yes, indeed. But it’s not that easy as you maybe think.

While talking with a colleague, she told me that she would like to know more about NetApp. Unfortunately we don’t have a NetApp system in our lab and playing with customer equipment is… mmh…unfavorable. But there’s a solution for this problem: Simulate ONTAP 8. This software allows you to simulate a 7-Mode or Cluster-Mode (c-Mode) system and to test many of the features. All you need is a VMware Workstation/ Player/ Fusion or an ESXi host.

This is a really short post. A first step can be the configuration of CIFS. This is done using “cifs setup” command. After you’ve setup CIFS, you can create volumes and qtrees, you can share them with you Windows server etc. It’s a good start into your Data ONTAP 8 journey.

The requirements

All you need is a configured ONTAP 8 simulator instance and a Windows Domain Controller with Active Directory.