Recently words cloud and virtualization are more and more common. And when you think about it, it actually make sense. To accomplish best scaling possibilities, to extract the full benefit of your hardware investment, virtualization make a lot of sense! NetApp with ONTAP 7-mode approach did a little bit of that bringing the vFilers. However, it still had a lot of limitations, for instance all resources were limited to a single Filer that was hosting the vFiler. With introduction of Clustered ONTAP NetApp brings much more benefits from virtualization to storage systems, to give you a few:
- Introduction of Storage Virtual Machine (SVM) which I have already briefly discussed in NetApp cDOT – what is SVM or vserver ? post. In a nutshell SVM is acting as a dedicated virtual storage controller, with its own data volumes, CIFS shares, NFS exports, and LUNs. It is not “linked” to single node – it can utilize physical storage resource pool, containing all nodes within the cluster
- Different type of physical storage controller models can be connected to build a single cluster
- NetApp cDOT brings Quality of Service (QoS) to help managing resource utilization between storage workloads
- Almost all maintenance ops can be executed without downtime, including software and firmware updates.