Comments on: Two things I want in ONTAP

By: scott

scott — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 03:54:43 +0000

I just set up a LUN on our NetApp with a Solaris 10 x86-64 VM mounting it with iSCSI for ZFS.
Why?
Compression.
The data I have for this LUN compresses at 5-1 with NTFS or ZFS compression. For performance, security, and management reasons ZFS is definitely superior to NTFS managed from a VM (and SAMBA is built-in in Solaris 10 U4).
I can also easily mount this LUN from any other machine if my VM dies somehow and I can’t re-initialize from its snapshot on another ESX host.

I would have gone through none of that trouble if WAFL on the NetApp had compression. Its a no-brainer for performance on many workloads.

By: the occasional blog

the occasional blog — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 00:30:05 +0000

Would DTrace make sense on ONTAP ?

DTrace is meant for sysadmins (and developers, so they say, as if I am going to give them my root role) and service personnel who want to interrogate the system to better understand the OS behavior and the userland programs. There is no use re-counting…

By: mark

mark — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 20:26:13 +0000

Totally Rajeev. The split small/large crap that’s necessary because of SNMPv1’s 32bit counters are a total pain.

By: rajeev karamchedu

rajeev karamchedu — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 19:47:48 +0000

May not be my biggest feature request (that would be to get GX working with Volume clustering et al) but I would appreciate if they provided support for SNMP v2c. The netapp mib is filled with good information but the version 1 support tends to shrug people away — or make the apps run not so fast.

By: SR

SR — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 15:48:41 +0000

I’d like to see this lifted too This seems to be a common limit on Linux/Solaris etc on 32 bit platforms. The common explanation is (2^32)*4kb page size = 16TB.