Daily Archives: January 18, 2006

January’s Tech OnTap

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Last night, the January 2006 edition of Tech OnTap was released. Althought I haven’t had time today to review the whole thing, it looks like there is some great stuff in there. If you haven’t already done so, be sure to sign up to receive the latest editions in your inbox. To give you a preview, here are this edition’s highlights:

  • NetApp Vision of the Grid.
  • SQL Server 2005 Benchmark
  • NFSv4 Benefits and Misconceptions
  • Free Monitoring Tool: ToasterView
  • Special Access: Online Launch Event
  • Six Predictions for 2006

There is also a great article in there describing the new TPC-C (Transaction Processing Performance Council) record that Netapp, IBM and Microsoft jointly achieved. This performance group benchmarked the fastest TPC-C performance number ever for a 16-way, Xeon based server: 492,307 tpmC. This setup cost $3,138,060! Click here for the published document from TPC.
There’s a ton of other stuff in this month’s edition…be sure to check it out!

[tags]netapp, ontap, tpc, benchmark, grid, nfs, nfsv4, predictions, tech[/tags]

SAN Boot

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Call me a geek, but I think SAN (Storage Area Network) Booting is probably one of the coolest things there is. I’ve been working with it a lot lately, and the more I work with it, the more I like it…especially on NetApp storage! For those of you not familiar with SAN’s, it’s basically booting your computer off of a NetApp filer. That’s right….no hard drive is needed in your computer. What’s so cool about that? Think about it…you can load an operating system on a NetApp filer in Germany and boot off of it in the USA over iSCSI. Now, you probably wouldn’t want to do that, because the speed would be terrible right now…but the fact that you can is amazing. What’s even cooler is being able to use ndmp, Snapshots, etc. on the filer to further the reliability, scalability, etc.. If you boot off of the filer, all of your data is constantly backed up via NetApp Snapshot Technology. With Snapshots, you can backup and restore all of your data in an emergency situation in seconds. Seriously, Snapshots typically take less than one second to create and can be scheduled. What about ndmp? Well, I’ve been doing some experimenting…I have 2 clustered filers, one running Data ONTAP 7.0.3, and the other cluster runs Data ONTAP 7.1rc4. Well, after I boot off of the cluster running 7.0.3…what if I want to boot off of the other cluster? I simply ran ‘ndmpcopy -sa user:pwd -da user:pwd /vol/vol1 filer2:/vol/vol1′ and all of my data was copied to the other cluster in 2 minutes. Then, I just changed the HBA settings to see the other filer, and bam….booted Windows Server 2003 from the other cluster.

[tags]netapp, ontap, san, sanboot, boot, iscsi, snapshot, ndmp[/tags]