I’m off to the airport for NetApp Insight 2011, which allows me to trade the 50 degree Minnesota temperatures right now for what looks to be a week of low 80 degree temperatures.

For me one of the big focus areas this year is to dig into ONTAP 8.1 cluster mode, which NetApp has said is going to be their future.  The traditional 7-mode will still be around, but (almost?) all R&D will be put into the cluster mode features.  The cluster mode product isn’t anything new to NetApp, they acquired Spinnaker around 2004 and have been offering ONTAP GX which allowed 24 nodes in a single namespace cluster.  The issue was that the commands were not similar between ONTAP 7G and ONTAP GX as well as differing feature sets.  The paths are starting to converge and 8.1 offers some features that weren’t found with ONTAP GX such as:

• Support for SAN (ONTAP GX only supported NAS protocols)
• SnapMirror for replication
• Deduplication

There are a few things that aren’t yet supported (as far as I know) in cluster mode (SnapVault is one that comes to mind) but it’s nice to see it coming closer to feature parity with the 7-mode offering.

Tuesday:

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Friday:

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