Way back in 2003, an eternity in tech years, Network Appliance purchased Spinnaker Networks an appliance maker that utilized SpinFS. Since the acquisition NetApp , as it is now called, has developed two different operating system offerings a.k.a. their “special sauce.” The original ONTAP “flavor” (ONTAP 8 7-mode) and the ONTAP 8 Cluster-mode, a reincarnate of technology acquired from Spinnaker and previously known as ONTAP GX.

As the world of computing, has changed over the years, we have lived through consolidation of server count and the increase in ease of management thanks to the virtualization craze, only to find out that our data did not stop growing. In fact, with our connected world of emails, texts, apps, music, movies, status updates and Facebook photo albums with pictures of our exciting family vacation to a museum (all 200 of them); we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. Per IBM, 90% of the world’s data has been generated in the past two years!

This is my advice for customers who want to get started with storage efficiency:
• Consider SATA drives instead of Fiber Channel
• Enable Dedupe
• (Use Flash Cache as insurance against bad performance)
NetApp has other efficiency features too (thin provisioning, cloning, compression, and so on), but I’ve found that customers often start with SATA and dedupe. SATA because it saves so much money, and dedupe because it’s so easy to turn on and comes free with ONTAP.
When I talk with customers who are using SATA and dedupe, they are usually happy with NetApp, and pleased with their storage costs. When customers are haggling over price but haven’t at least considered these features, I wonder what they are thinking.
SATA with Flash Cache doesn’t always match the performance of Fiber Channel, but when it does, it can cut your costs in half. It’s definitely worth considering! We have many happy customers using it for production data. Home directories are a good place to start. Email, especially with the most recent versions of Exchange. Some customers use it for database, depending on the workload.

Data protection is an essential part of every IT strategy. A good data protection plan minimizes the risk of downtime and data loss as well as the risk of a compliance incident. Most enterprise level data protection implementations are complex, costly and require thoughtful planning to ensure that the risk of data loss is reduced to an acceptable level.

As with any technology there is no shortage of catch phrases to distract the overburdened administrator as well as the budget conscious executive. Phrases like “Integrated Data Protection”, “Industry Leading”, “End to End” and yes, even “cloud”. Let’s face it. The only reason you spend a dime on this stuff is to reduce risk because risk adds cost to your operation. The cost of data re-entry, the cost of down time or the cost of compliance fines. How simple or complex the system that you create to deal with risk is not the issue. The issue is whether the cost of the system is less than the risk of doing nothing.

It is already the second half of August and we are quickly approaching a busy conference time for DLT. Up-coming events will take DLT all over the country, but some of the best are local ones happening just down the road. The annual Innovation Nation Forum, hosted by MeriTalk, will take place Tuesday, August 23 at the Washington Convention Center. Aiming to “Shake IT Up,” Innovation Nation will focus on three Federal IT hot topics- cloud computing, cybersecurity and data center consolidation.

Cindy Cassill is the director of systems integration in the office of the CIO for the US Department of State. Prior to her current position at the Department of State, Cindy has over 30 years of federal IT experience. She was the CIO at the FAA Regions & Centers. She also was the CIO at the US Army Test and Evaluation Command and was the director of IT at the deputy assistant secretary of the army for civilian personnel.

This article highlights portions of Cindy Cassill’s presentation and the steps the agency took for their consolidation. Click Here to download the entire presentation and transcript at length.

Did you know that NetApp has a news program that talks about the latest happenings at the company? If you didn’t, that’s ok. A good starting place would be their 2010 review. Take a look at the video below:

I really enjoy these “Play by Play” segments with NetApp’s Mike Riley. In his latest, he talks about NetApp Unified Storage. This is a good lead in to the webcast we are having in a few weeks on the very same topic. Check out the video below and learn more about the webcast here.

Check out the video below. It is a nice overview of NetApp Data Motion and shows how it enhances shared storage infrastructure.

NetApp has a robust data protection suite that can archive and replicate data as well as integrate with most primary applications like collaboration, database, web and virtualization technologies. The foundation for this data protection is the NetApp Snapshot. A Snapshot is a read-only point-in-time image of the active file system. The Snapshot technology is an integrated feature of WAFL (Write Anywhere File Layout), a block-based file system that uses inodes to reference files that are built into Data ONTAP, the micro kernel that runs on all NetApp storage.
When a snapshot is requested, WAFL creates a new Snapshot by making an exact copy of the root inode. This copy of the root inode becomes the root of the data representing the Snapshot, just as the root inode represents the active file system. When the Snapshot inode is created, it points to exactly the same disk blocks as the root inode, so a brand new Snapshot consumes no disk space except for the Snapshot inode itself.

With many of us experiencing explosive growth, companies niched in broadcast, media, and entertainment are left trying to figure out how to improve data availability while minimizing cost.  Here at DLT we are helping customers: