NetApp autosupport
I was reading through some of the recent comments on the blog, and found one from Mark Mayo. Come to find out, not only does he use Macs, but he is also a fan of NetApp. Yesterday, he wrote a post called “NetApp autosupport rocks.” This is a topic that I’ve been wanting to talk about for quite some time now. Reading Mark’s article made me proud to work at NetApp. Now, since I work on host side development within NetApp, I don’t get to see autosupport work in action (we disable this in our lab), because we do lots of things to these boxes and as such, we would drive the support team crazy. But, I have seen it in action in some of my training classes.
The support team takes autosupports very seriously, and Mark’s article is a perfect example. I encourage you to read his article here, but basically the idea is this: Mark added a new disk shelf to an existing filer. When he added the new disks, the filer noticed that the disks were previously in another aggregate and immediately marked the aggregate as offline to preserve data. It then generated an error to inform the admin that the disks are offline. Well, it sent out a few emails, and also submitted a trouble ticket with NetApp Global Support (NGS). He received a call within EIGHT minutes from NGS and they were ready to walk him through the process to “online” his newly added disks. NGS also received information that a firmware update failed, and they were ready to ship him a new part. It’s just another example of NetApp striving to be “Fast, Simple, and Reliable.”
