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"V" for V-series





So, let's say you read with interest all the articles about interesting features of NetApp, and maybe even figured out how they can be useful to you, but alas.

- Where were you a year ago, - you can quite reasonably tell me - When did we buy the storage system from (insert the name of some vendor)? And now everything, “I have been given to another and I will be faithful to him forever.” Well, or not century, and until the end of the period of paid support, usually . Why did you not tell about all these possibilities before, before we bought this our storage system?

“It doesn't matter,” I will tell you in return, NetApp has something to offer in such a case.



The fact is that for quite some time (albeit somewhat in the shadow) NetApp has existed, as if parallel to the main FAS line - Fabric Attached Storage, and also a series of V-series controllers - “controller-virtualizer” similar to its overall capabilities.



Using the V-series controller, you can take your existing FC SAN storage systems, one or more, create LUNs on it, and connect such LUNs, like disks, to the V-series controller

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That is, the storage system you already have does the only thing that it does well - it creates network hard disks in the form of LUNs in the SAN, and the NetApp V-series Controller takes them and uses them as it uses regular physical disks from its own disk shelves.



In fact, the only thing you don’t get when using this design from an “external” storage system and a “virtualizer” controller is RAID-DP . The fact is that LUNs are created on the storage system already on top of some RAID, it is already RAID-fault-tolerant, it makes no sense to build another RAID layer over one RAID, so the NetApp V-series controller simply places it on top of such LUNs its WAFL structure, distributing it to LUNs in the style of RAID-0, that is, block-wise interleaved. In fact, for example, you get a RAID-50 structure from a LUN in a RAID-5 (and so on).



All the rest, for example, “universal storage” , with work with both NAS protocols and SAN, WAFL , deduplication , snapshots , clones , thin provisioning , FCoE and Unified Target for all protocols into a single physical interface 10G Ethernet, metro cluster , synchronous and asynchronous replication over IP and FC, or Flash Cache .

All of this is available for use on V-series systems, as well as on conventional FAS.



Today, each manufactured model FAS midrange-series FAS32xx and highend-series FAS62xx has the corresponding embodiment in the form of an equivalent V, which means that you can choose among 6 models of different levels of performance.



It is curious that now V-series controllers are able to use not only "external", "third-party" storage systems, but even NetApp own disk shelves, because "physically" V-series controllers are the same FAS controllers, and this division is more "Political" than "physical". Perhaps in the future, these two lines will merge into one, but for now, if you need the ability to use "third-party" disks as part of third-party storage systems, you should take a V-series controller, and without this possibility, work only with your own disk shelves - NetApp FAS.



As of the time of this writing, the work was done on connecting and virtualizing the following systems and vendors:



As you can see, the coverage is more than substantial.



Please note that the models for which it is indicated [only with V31xx / 30xx / 60xx] are old, no longer produced models. For such models, official certification of compatibility with new controllers is no longer carried out, but you can usually request a compatibility solution as part of the PVR procedure, specifically for your configuration.

A number of even older models, such as HDS AMS 9520/9570/9580/9585, Lightning 9910/60/70/80 (and their corresponding HP XP), HP EVA3000 / 5000, archaeological "four-digit" Symmetrix, Clariion CX to CX3 and CX4 , IBM DS old versions (IBM FASt) and ESS, they are all supported only for Data ONTAP 7.x, for the same reason.



Any tricky guitars are not supported, at the level of the controllers of the connected stack itself, for example, replication, dynamic resizing, migration, and other tricky features of internal hardware, but, for example, replication, resizing, and some other features can be realized further with NetApp.

You can even connect different controllers to NetApp V-series (though not in one aggregate).

You can even use them non-exclusive, that is, continue to use part of the stack “natively”, and part - to give under the V-series (there are a number of technical limitations, but, in principle, it is possible).



So, if you have an old IBM DS4700 or HP EVA or even HDS USP that is very popular at the time, and you don’t want to throw it away, change it to NetApp, then you you can give it a new life, and your IT infrastructure new opportunities, not throwing it away, but by connecting and using it through the virtualization controller NetApp V-series, getting with it all the new and attractive features of the NetApp FAS systems that I wrote about in blog before .



Ps. I would like to draw the attention of blog readers that there is also a separate section for questions , where you can ask various questions, not only about products and technologies already told, for example, “how much does it cost?” , “Why is everything so expensive?” technologies and products will suit your specific situation, which topics would be more interesting, and in general everything that you would like to ask NetApp and its experts.



I would also like to note that if you are interested in what I am writing here, then the best way to mark this would be to add to the “fans” (the button with the “heart” next to the blog name), it won't cost you anything, and Russian NetApp would be nice.

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/121227/

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