I recently ran into a situation with a customer where we were attempting to add a small subset of SSDs into an existing NetApp A200 configuration that leveraged the lastest version of Advanced Disk Partitioning (ADP). For those not familiar with ADP and what it brings to the table, please see fellow NetApp A-Teamer ChrisContinue reading
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Easily Convert NetApp LUNs to VHDX or VMDK files… It’s Magic!
Before I even get into the details, I’m pretty sure you can only do this on NetApp. I’ve never seen any other array with this kind of capability. This just goes to show the power of NetApp’s tool suite surrounding their storage arrays. I also want to give a shout out to Jeremy Goodrum (@virtpirate)Continue reading
NetApp A-Team ETL 2017 – Thoughts From This Week
This past week the NetApp A-Team met at NetApp’s facility in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina for our annual ETL meeting (Extract, Transform, Load). The 25 member team from NetApp partners, customers, and alliance vendors from around the globe, combined with another 15+ NetApp-employed A-Team tech advisors, spent two days in a room with NetAppContinue reading
2017 Predictions, Prospects, and Prognostications
It’s always fun to make these kind of predictions. If only for the purpose of allowing me to look back in a year’s time and see how well, or poorly, I can predict the future. So, here goes… #1 – OpenStack Overlays Get Noticed OpenStack is now on it’s 14th release – Newton – andContinue reading
DevOps Deep Thoughts: No Dev, No Problem!
DevOps, a fairly new process framework for IT Operations and Application Developers to work together more efficiently, has gained a lot of press in the last couple of years and has found adoption in many of the Fortune 1000. Beyond the improvements in Dev and Ops organizational communication, DevOps also brings forth a laser-focused approachContinue reading
Using Veeam ONE for Capacity Planning
I began my current career path as an IT consultant back in 2005. If you recall, this was just about the same time as VMware started raising eyebrows. The release of ESX 3.0 came the following year, 2006. And thusly, the server virtualization revolution went into full effect. We had a lot of challenges thoseContinue reading
Comparing Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Cisco Spark
Yesterday, Microsoft took their investments in Yammer and Skype and launched a new product that combined features from both into a product called Microsoft Teams. Like many other group collaboration platforms, Teams is meant to allow multiple people in an organization to chat in a group setting while also reviewing documents and other content. WhileContinue reading
NetApp CloudSync – More Than Just Peanuts for Elephants
As more companies begin to delve into Big Data and analytics on a larger scale, they are beginning to notice that data mobility is one of the largest challenges. Hadoop clusters – whether deployed on-premises or leveraging cloud-based services such as Amazon Web Services Elastic Map Reduce (EMR) – previously required a coupling of the dataContinue reading
SnapMirror Initialize – Auto-Restart Powershell Script
I have a client that recently wanted to SnapMirror a 2TB volume to their DR array. Normally this wouldn’t be a hard task to tackle. In this instance the client was using a very unstable IPSec tunnel across their corporate Internet connection to their DR facility. Their Internet connectivity was already somewhat congested at certainContinue reading
An Introduction to Workflow Development in NetApp OnCommand Workflow Automation – Part 1
NetApp’s OnCommand Workflow Automation (WFA) tool is so incredibly powerful. Right out of the box, you have the ability to automate a large number of common (and some not-so-common) NetApp administration tasks. What pains me is how WFA is overlooked for its ability to be used as an automation platform for more than just NetAppContinue reading