Get back on Track after a five years gap

[vims]

Hello Gurus,
I am back in NetApp world after unfortune 5 years gap. Ended up with 8.3 7 mode and now it is 9.7. Obviously they are drastically different and I need to catch up with it. If anyone was in the similar situation and go through that, I'd appreciate if you share your experience. Kind regards and thank you in advance. 

[Ontapforrum · Accepted solution]

Welcome back!! It's never too late. Last supported version for 7-mode was 8.2.5, so and it's been cluster (cdot/ontap) since 8.3 onwards and now it is 9.9.x but don't look at the version gap here, versions keep rolling in but the key is to get the understanding of the basic ontap architecture (clustered). To be honest once you understand the basic architecture of cdot/ontap, it isn't difficut to catchup with all the latest offerings. It's been more scaled/virtualized in cdot, but good old wafl/flexclone/snapmirror remains the same. Of coruse there has been lots of changes but if you spend some time reading on knowledgebase and all information available at google around netapp, I am sure you will be fine. If you have access to ontap simulators that would speed up your learning as well. Good luck and you will be fine!  

[vims]

Great thank you for the reply and pointing to the direction. 

[AlexDawson]

Hi Vims, Welcome back!

If I had to sum up the last 5 years I'd look at hardware/hosting, and features.

For hardware/hosting - there's new physical platforms, all SAS is 12GB now, and some SSD shelves use 100Gbit Ethernet for connectivity. Cluster interconnect is 40 or 100Gbit. We also have a QLC Flash based platform, the FAS500f. Client connectivity is now possible with NVMe over fibre, and some of the SSDs are NVMe backend too. ONTAP also runs inside all three major cloud providers, and we provide infrastructure to enable first party file services from ONTAP for Azure (Azure NetApp Files) and AWS (FSx ONTAP). We've also released SAN only flash platforms called the ASA, which support LUNs beyond 16Tb as well as true active/active LUN access.

In terms of features, as well as adding NVMe over FC and S3 for client connectivity, we can scale volumes out beyond 100TB with Flexgroups, and we can tier cold data to S3 targets using Fabricpools. We can detect malware and automatically snapshot to prevent significant data loss, as well as monitoring volume utilisation - how much of the data is hot vs cold, and which files and volumes they are. We've just added support to send snapshots to an S3 target too.

For a more in depth read of what's been introduced in each point release of 9.0, check out the ONTAP Release notes here - https://library.netapp.com/ecm/ecm_download_file/ECMLP2492508

Best wishes as you continue your storage journey!

[vims]

Thanks Alex  for the summary and bullet points. It is really helpful. 

It will speed up to get to the Guru point again 🙂 

Kind regards