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I was fortunate enough to get to spend an hour with Dmitriy Sandler from Nimble Storage to see what all the fuss was about with their product and more specifically their Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL) File System. Hardware Overview Let’s cover some of the basics before we dive into CASL. The storage array comes fully loaded with all the bells and whistles, out of the box. All the software features are included with this iSCSI array and include items such as: ...

I was recently helping out a company attempt to upgrade their Netapp Filer from OnTap 7.3 over to Data OnTap 8. We ran the Netapp Upgrade advisor and got to a section that wanted us to run the AggrSpaceCheck tool to make sure that the aggregates had sufficient space available. Normally, I skip this step because I usually have plenty of space available, but in this particular case, some of the aggregates were already 99% full. Since we didn’t want to have a serious failure during our upgrade we decided to error on the side of caution (and best practices) and run the AggrSpaceCheck tool. ...

I found people have a hard time understanding that a SAN Snapshot and a VMware snapshot are fundamentally different. I think because unless you’re a storage administrator, you’re probably not dealing a whole lot with snaps to begin with. VMware has made it more commonplace for System Administrators to deal with snapshot technology. SAN Snapshots Lets first look at how traditional SANs take snapshots. To start we have 6 blocks being used. The file system has marked blocks which blocks are being used. ...