NetApp introduction and terminologies

Hello folks, we are going to discuss about NetApp in this section and some terminologies
associated with it. NetApp filers, which we are talking about here are enterprise class storage
solutions which serve both purposes of a SAN and a NAS. As a SAN ( Storage Area Network )
device, it serves block level storage space to servers in a production environment and as a NAS
( Network Attached Storage ) device, it serves files level storage space to servers. When serving
space at block level, it uses Fibre Channel ( FC ) and iSCSI protocols and when serving space at
file level it uses NFS, CIFS, HTTP, FTP and TFTP protocols. The basic architecture of a storage
environment is shown in the following figure.

Here, there are multiple storage filers ( NetApp ) which are connected to a fabric. Fabric is an
interconnection of fibre channel switches or SAN switches among themselves through Inter
Switch Links (ISLs). The filers providing the storage and the servers using the storage are also
connected to the SAN switches through Fibre Channel or Host Bus Adapters (HBAs), for the
connections Standard Connectors (SC) or Lucent Connectors (LC) are used. The devices are
connected to the switches through multiple connectors to ensure redundancy in event of failures.
The filer has fibre channel interfaces for providing block level access, console interface for
configuring the device by connecting it directly to an administrative host and also ethernet
interfaces to take care of the file level access through TCP protocols and also to connect it to a
large scale network. When the SAN functionalities of the filer has to be used, the devices interact
over fibre channel or iscsi and when the NAS functionality is to be used, they interact over the
ethernet connections.
The filer is a device similar to our normal computer CPU units, consisting of boards, processors,
memory and NVRAM, a proprietary operating system called the Data ONTAP which is presently
at version 8 and a unique filesystem called WAFL (Write Anywhere File Layout). The filer is

connected to disk shelves through adapters, these disk shelves are separate units which contain
an array of individual disks of FC, SATA and SAS types. There are multiple such disk shelves
connected to the filer and they are the source of the storage space available to the host systems
through the filer unit. The storage space from the filer can be used in heterogeneous systems, i.e.
Windows, Linux and Unix. The filer can be configured and managed through a command line
interface similar to that of Unix or a GUI interface called FilerView. We shall have a look at the
details of the filer components in the next section.
There are some terminologies related to NetApp which we shall explore in subsequent sections.
We just take a brief tour through them.
1) Plex - A plex is a collection of one or more raid groups that together provide storage for
WAFL volumes in NetApp. All raid groups in a plex are of the same level but they may have
different number of disks. Subsequent units of storage such as aggregates are created on plexes.
2) Aggregate - An aggregate is a collection of one or two plexes and is created from multiple
number of disks of the same type. If Sync mirror feature is not enabled in the filer or if the
aggregate is unmirrored, a single plex is used for the aggregate whereas if Sync mirror is enabled
a second plex is added to the aggregate which acts as a RAID-level mirror for the first one.
RAID level can be defined when creating the aggregate, raid4 for single parity and raid_dp for
dual parity (similar to raid6).
3) Volume - Volumes are the usable space created on aggregates which can be used as file level
access in Unix through NFS and in Windows through CIFS.
4) Qtrees - Qtrees are optional logical entities which can be created on a volume for better usage
of data. It can be termed as a subdirectory of the root of the volume. Qtrees can be provisioned
for Windows and Unix hosts through types such as ntfs, unix and mixed. Quotas can also be
implemented on qtrees to limit the usage of data by individuals.
5) LUN - LUNs are the next level of storage unit available which are created on the volumes and
are provisioned to heterogeneous hosts i.e. Windows, Linux and Unix to be used as block level
storage. When a LUN is provisioned to a host and it is scanned from the host, the space is
available on the host as it would be visible in case of a new hard drive. The space is then
partitioned and formatted and used.
6) Snapshot - Snapshots are the first step towards disaster recovery feature of NetApp filers.
Snapshots are a point in time, read-only copy of the entire volume which are stored in the
volume itself. In case of file removals or damages or even entire volume damages, the data can
be retrieved from snapshots.