Simplifying ONTAP User Experience

[ScottPeiffer]

I am Scott Peiffer, Sr. Director from the ONTAP System Manager Product Management & Technical Marketing team. Thank you to our many passionate customers and partners for sharing your feedback on System Manager 9.8. This post is to provide you with background on the changes being made to ONTAP, information on how to learn more about these changes, and guidance on how best to provide feedback to NetApp.

ONTAP System Manager simplification is to directly address your changing needs as you work to support larger data sets, with new applications while expanding into hybrid multi-cloud environments. The simplification effort has been data driven. Significant time was spent on determining and setting smart defaults based on NetApp best practices, automating, and simplifying many of the everyday tasks, and then prioritized workflows that were most frequently used. Since ONTAP provides AIQ with metrics on feature usage, we were able to understand what features our customer use most and what is infrequently used.

The feedback that has been received is being considered and prioritized. To be transparent, there are other items which will not be addressed as they are considered complex, infrequent, or unneeded based on our desire to provide our customers with self-managing storage.

We also hear analysts, for example Gartner stating by 2023, 60% of organizations will use infrastructure automation tools as part of their DevOps toolchains, and improve application deployment efficiency by 25%. (source: Market Guide for Infrastructure Automation Tools, May 2020). API driven integrations will be essential to our customers success. Anecdotally, we have heard in our virtual EBCs that many of our globals and large enterprise customers are managing their infrastructure with tools such as Service Now and Remedy, and even homegrown tools that consolidate service management across various vendors in their data center, all based on API services. There are a number of such tools that operate in infrastructure and application context that we are looking to support...

To aid you in this transition we have published an extensive set of documents here: https://community.netapp.com/t5/Tech-ONTAP-Blogs/Where-can-I-learn-more-about-System-Manager-9-8/ba-p/162249

Please continue to share your feedback though your NetApp account teams! This is how we can best aggregate feedback, address your needs and respond. Help us along this journey with your improvement suggestions.

Sincerely,
Ravi Chhabria (VP Engineering)
Scott Peiffer (Sr. Director ONTAP System Manager Product Management & Technical Marketing)

[SomeGuy]

I have no seen any improvements in the UI with 9.8. We still have 8080s in our cluster, and netapp in their infinite wisdom has decided not to allow the 8080s to go about 9.8, even though the hardware is supported until the end of 2022.

I have yet to see anything above 9.8, but I would get on 9.9 as fast as I could if I had the option. 9.8 is just horrible.

[TMADOCTHOMAS]

Thank you @SomeGuy ! Unfortunately you confirmed what I suspected :(. Yeah I have to upgrade to 9.8 for compatibility with the new card, and then I plan to move to 9.9.1 as soon as possible thereafter. Unfortunately from what I've read, even 9.9.1 still doesn't have some critical basics in the GUI (resizing volumes!!).

[VladimirBarancok]

We are on 9.9.1 and GUI is not much better than 9.8 ( lipstick on a pig :-)) but you CAN resize the Volumes. 
We were on 9.8 but it simply wasnt usable so quickly moved to 9.9.1 and you can do quite a bit ad-hoc changes now in the GUI. 
For setting up the cluster you WILL need to use the CLI - there is no way around it.

[SomeGuy]

Resize is there, it's just not obvious.  There have been many other foolish decisions, like viewing at the volumes in an aggregate won't show you their size (WTF is the point of looking at them?). Snapmirror configuration is a joke because you can't determine the aggregate it will go to at the destination, so I do all that through cli.

My issues are around the performance. If there is a long list of objects, like volumes or network interfaces, you can't look at the entire list. The interface will just keep reloading it. We do everything on term servers, which are pokey at screen refreshes already. You can scroll halfway down the list, and it refreshes and you have to start all over again.

You can filter at the top to make the list smaller, which for some reason requires a button to engage rather than always being available. But that's not a great answer. If that list is too big, you still get the refreshing. All of this takes up way too much time.

At this point, I use DFM to look for objects that need attention, and then make any changes I need to make in the CLI. It's not ideal. We also have lots of people that aren't well versed with the cli, and they go to the gui. It's terrible. They start contacting me for help.

I really have no idea what NetApp was thinking with this new interface, but I have already decided it's a lost cost and have had to become more familiar with the CLI.

[TMADOCTHOMAS]

Thank you very much @VladimirBarancok and @SomeGuy ! Good to know that resizing IS in 9.9.1, I thought it wasn't. From what I've read, 9.10.1 actually finally cleans up a lot of the 9.8 mess, but I'm not going to upgrade until several patches have been released. Hopefully we can limp along on 9.9.1 until then. Thank you both for the tips.

[iant424242]

When I first got involved in this thread, I was hoping Netapp would address the endless list of issues. However having read the plethora of subsequent emails, it seems to fallen onto deaf ears!

I too, recently installed a metro cluster using Ontap 9.8P7 and could believe how inadequate the user experience was, dare I say almost embarrassing. How can a flagship product not have a proper fully integrated gui experience. I could go on….

If Netapp fully intend to stay on this course then maybe they should employ a two tier login approach, meaning an Admin login gives us the well-thought-out old user interface and a user login the new dumbed down visual display.

[SomeGuy]

Yes, and what is even more frustrating is that they are able to do so. 9.7 had both the old and new interface installed, and there was a link to try it out. It was awful and I always chalked it up to it being a sorta of beta.

Supposedly it has gone this way because they have made everything in ONTAP available by API. I still don't understand why that means the old interface won't work, considering they had both available in a previous release.

I do find myself using the CLI more and more, and with that I can do less and less with the gui. It's not ideal, but in some ways I feel like that is the way the world is going anyway.