NetApp SolidFire: First steps

By | 21. May 2017

Hello together,

last week NetApp has provided me, through a Distributor, a SolidFire test position to “Play”. The “baby” came in a pre-assembled “travel crib” and was completely wired.

Connect only the power, turn, race to the fuse box and securing a make again and there you go.

The standard equipment you connect a monitor and a keyboard on the nodes and forgive IP addresses for the management and for the 10GbE adapter. About the 10 GbE adapter later held the iSCSI traffic.

After that only on one of the nodes a cluster name enter…

… and then the IP address of the first node with a Web browser to surf. You will be prompted then a new cluster to set up. Nodes that are available to the clustering available are displayed you here directly. You forgive only a management (virtual IP) VIP for the cluster, an iSCSI VIP, user name and password, accepts the EULA and click “create cluster”. Thats it! Up to this point, not even 30 minutes have passed.

Only you give the management IP in your browser which you have previously issued and logs on with the username and password you will receive with the message that (in this case) 40 disks are available that are added to the cluster.

Then I created a volume, minimal IOPS, maximum IOPS and IOPS burst…

an iSCSI initiator installed (my notebook)…

…dem volume the iSCSI initiator assigned to…

…auf of my notebook for iSCSI devices searched…

…das found device connected to…

… and zack already I have the volume of the SolidFire as a disk on my laptop…

I’ve located a virtual machine using VMWARE workstation there on this plate, then watched the IOPS when climbing. Granted some very, if my laptop has just over 1 GbE, but it conveys a sense of the power of the SolidFire ever.

You can see already, this is not rocket science all and comes already very close to ZeroTouch storage ran. The present system seemed as minimal facilities with four nodes. These four nodes to provide 200,000 IOPS in one fell swoop. I need more IOPS, so do I add an additional node and have then 250,000 IOPS. So a very quick and easy scaling. Almost by itself, it is that the SolidFire with inline deduplication and compression is therefore.

Backup to cloud, SnapShotting, cloning and replication (pairing) are also included. To do this, but maybe in a later blog post.

I hope that I could give you a brief insight into the first steps with a SolidFire and am looking forward to your comments.

Greeting

DerSchmitz

5 thoughts on “NetApp SolidFire: First steps

  1. Moray Ho

    Hello Herr Schmitz,

    I did the same but get stuck when configuring iSCSI on my notebook. My notebook is running Windows 10 with VirtualBox. No DNS server. All static IP addresses. using the button “discover portal” and in advanced I check CHAP and fill in user name (SolidFire account name) and target secret (SolidFire initiator secret). Then I get “connection broken-off”. I can ping the SVIP grom my notebook.

    Any help is much appreciated. Thanks. Moray

    Reply
    1. DerSchmitz Post author

      Hi Moray, in default you don’t need a CHAP authentication. Solidfire Account name and password is not the same as CHAP credentials. Just leave CHAP blank.

      Reply
      1. Moray Ho

        Just forgot to mention that SolidFire is on the same notebook as simulator, perhaps i need an iSNS-server? If I leave the CHAP-field empty I get the error “host not found” or “connection broken-off”. It must be a small thing but I can not put the finger on the problem unfortunately.

        Reply
  2. Venkat

    Hi DerSchmitz,
    What is the difference between the SVIP which we create while creating The new cluster ( also displays the IP in dashboard ) and SVIP which we create while configuring virtual networks. Which IP used by the clients to communicate storage system. Please help me to understand.

    Reply
    1. DerSchmitz Post author

      SVIP is used as iSCSI Target for the clients. If you create a new virtual network (VLAN) then the VLAN SVIP can be used to access data.

      Reply

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