Re: [aperi-dev] NetApp Unified Storage Appliance Report: From Specificat

[Hans Lin <linh@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Simona,

Can you clarify in the Wednesday's Aperi design & architecture meeting that Snapshot is a "frozen," read-only view of a WAFL volume and will not be in the NetApp Unified Storage Appliance Report and the rest of 'volume' you had mentioned in the design document is just 'logical disk' created from NAS storage pools.

Hans H. Lin, Tivoli SAN Software Development
IBM Almaden Research Center, California
Phone: 408-927-2286, Fax: 408-927-2040
email: linh@xxxxxxxxxx

Simona Constantin <simona_constantin@xxxxxxxxxx>

Simona Constantin <simona_constantin@xxxxxxxxxx>
Sent by: aperi-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx

07/17/2007 08:30 AM

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Subject	[aperi-dev] NetApp Unified Storage Appliance Report: From Specification to the Design Document

OVERVIEW 

The purpose of this mail is  to describe: 
        -  what can and cannot be implemented 
        - how the report will look like 
This is not the whole design document. I haven't figured out yet all the implementation details  but I know by and large what can and what cannot be done. 
I hope we can discuss this further at Wednesdays meeting, if Dave agrees, of course. Comments coming by email are welcomed too. 

TASK's SPECIFICATIONS 

The specifications  have been defined in the document named "Net App Line Item", which was posted on aperi-dev list some time ago. 
For self-completness here are the paragraphs referring to the Unified Storage Appliance Report: 

--------------------------------------------------------Begin Excerpt from Specifications-------------------------------------------------- 
Create a new Unified Storage Appliance Report 
NetApp devices represent themselves in three different ways (depending on customer usage).   
Combined, this is referred to as a Unified Storage Appliance.  The three representations include: 
        - Traditional NAS filer (appliance storage is presented to clients as mounted file shares) 
        - FC block storage array (appliance provides FC attached blocks/volumes and looks just like a storage subsystem from this view) 
        - iSCSI block storage array (appliance provides iSCSI attached target volumes) 

However, Aperi's data server looks at NetApp appliances only as NAS filers, ignoring its other two personalities.   
To support a Unified Storage Appliance report, Aperi must gather information for all three representations.   

The Aperi data component gathers information on NetApp from 2 sources 
- Aperi data agent which sees the mounted file systems or Shares via NFS or CIFS views from a client perspective 
- NetApp SNMP MIB from which we get some basic, high level asset and simple capacity information on the whole NetApp box.   
There is a chance that this technique may produce inaccurate results.   

The Unified Storage View needs to show the following type of capacity information (exact information and metrics will be determined DIRECTLY from what NetApp provides in their new vendor specific profile for this): 
        1. Show Appliance capacities - raw, used, reserved storage 
        2. Label logical volumes as NAS, FC, iSCSI, or unassigned 
        3. Total storage capacity used for NAS, iSCSI, FCP Blocks, snapshot, snapshot reserve, free, and unallocated 
        4. Asset Information will already be available through information gathered in NAS Self-Contained Profile 
        5. Configuration information on NetApp such as RAID and Cache configurations 

Note that all of the above information will be available directly through SMI-S extension(s) from NetApp.   
We will use our existing SMI-S support structure as a base and gather information from the new NetApp vendor specific profile(s).   
The intent is to create a new Unified Storage Appliance Report that simply shows any and all information that NetApp gives to us in the vendor specific profile.   
We will also request from NetApp, field titles and descriptions that we will directly map to the report. 
So, basically, we take whatever NetApp hands us in the new SMIS profile and slap it into a report.   The new vendor specific profile is being created specifically for this report. 

We may wish to augment the information provided in the new profile with data we gather from other profiles such as the Block Services Profile, the SMI-S Self-Contained NAS profile, etc. 
--------------------------------------------------------End Excerpt from Specifications------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 


COMMENTS ON THE  SPECIFICATIONS 

1. Show Appliance capacities - raw, used, reserved storage 
It is unclear to me what the author meant by "Reserved Storage", I could speculate and come up with some amount for it, but to keep things clear I will not put this field in the report. 
The "Raw Storage" will be the total disk capacities. 
The "Used Storage" will be the sum of capacities of disks already assigned to aggregates (an aggregate is the highest level of disk grouping, lower level are plexes and raid groups; the filesystems, which are called volumes in NetApp terminology, are created on an aggregate). 
There also should be "Available Storage" which will be the sum of hot spare disks (disks that have not been added yet to any aggregates). 
All the information needed by this point is already collected by Array Profile implementation. 

2. Label logical volumes as NAS, FC, iSCSI, or unassigned 
A list of all file shares and LUNs will be displayed. 
For each file share the protocol through which it is exported will be displayed. Information will be available from the implementation of Self Contained NAS Profile . 
Each LUN  will be shown together with information about its mapping  information. This information is contained in Mapping and Masking subprofile  which has already been implemented as part of the Array Profile.   

3. Total storage capacity used for NAS, iSCSI, FCP Blocks, snapshot, snapshot reserve, free, and unallocated 
File shares and LUNs (iSCSI, FCP Blocks)  reside on a volume ( a volume is a special file system of type WAFL, specific for NetApp ). 
Snapshots are read-only copies of the files or LUNs and are stored on the volume and can be used as backups, but SMI-S agent does not offer any information about the snapshots. 
Following information can be displayed: "Total Space of the Volume",  "Space Occupied by LUNs",  "Space Occupied by File Shares",  "Free Space",  "Type of the Volume" ( flexible or traditional), "Aggregate the Volume Resides On". Most of the information will be made available by the Self Contained NAS  Profile and Array Profile work. But there is a big  piece that needs to be added and this is the association between the Volume and its logical disk . Without this associations we cannot tell type of the volume and which is the aggregate that contains the volume. 

5. Configuration information on NetApp such as RAID and Cache configurations 
RAID levels are specific to aggregates and this information is available from the "Array Profile" implementation.   
Cache configuration, I don't know what this is referring to. 


HOW THE REPORT WILL  LOOK LIKE 
I imagine the report as a series of hierarchical reports structured on four levels.   

        I.) The top level report will display general information about the filer. A row in this report will describe a filer and will contain following columns: "Filer Name", "Row Storage", "Used Storage" ( See 1. above ). Each row will have 2 icons on the left, because there will be two second level reports: one detailing the volumes (logical part), an the other the aggregates (physical part). 

        II.) Second level reports 
                II.I) One report will describe the Filer's volumes. Each row will correspond to a volume and will contain following columns:"Volume Name", "Volume Type", "Total Volume Space", "Space Occupied by LUNs", "Space Occupied by File Shares", "Free Space on the Volume", "Aggregate the Volume Resides On" (See 3. above). Clicking on one row will open the third level report ( see III ) 
                II.II) The other report will describe the Filer's aggregates. "Aggregate Name", "Aggregate Raid Level", "Aggregate Free Space" (See 5. above)   
        
        III.) Third level report will detail a volume content: the file shares and LUNs that are part of that volume. The columns of this report are: "LUN / File Share name", "Protocol"(CIFS,NFS,iSCSI,FC; should be mentioned here that a file can be shared using both CIFS and NFS and a LUN can be mapped through FC and iSCSI), "Allocated Space", "Space Occupied" ( See 2. above ) 

        IV.)  LUNs mapping details: FC initiator ports or iSCSI initiator nodes that have access to a LUN 
---
Simona Constantin
Phone: +(40)-725.164.930;_______________________________________________
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