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Re: [aperi-dev] NetApp Unified Storage Appliance Report: From Specification to the Design Document
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Let's discuss this more at the Wednesday
meeting. This is interesting stuff!
Dave Wolfe/Portland/IBM
(dwolfe@xxxxxxxxxx)
TL: 775-3376 Office: 503-578-3376 Personal: 503-329-3960
UI Technical Lead, Aperi Open Source Storage Management
http://www.eclipse.org/aperi
"A good composer does not imitate; he
steals." - Igor Stravinsky
Simona Constantin <simona_constantin@xxxxxxxxxx>
Sent by: aperi-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx
07/17/2007 08:30 AM
Please respond to
Aperi Development <aperi-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx> |
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To
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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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