I don’t often get to play with systems at work, my team wisely do not trust me to actually do real work which might break things. So I get to draw clouds, boxes; write weekly reports; go to meetings, struggle with spreadsheets and purchase-ordering systems. Every now and then, I get to pretend that I know what I’m talking about and spend time pontificating at vendors about my latest gripe with the storage industry! I now want to pontificate to the world, hence the blog!!!
But I do get itchy fingers and decide I want to play again, this normally involves me buying a piece of kit for home and trying to get it to work; I’ve built media-pcs, NAS boxes, digital photo-frames, web-servers and all kind of geeky stuff. My poor long suffering wife has to put up with a house full of cables, half-assembled computers, unlabeled cds and a general amount of chaos.
Anyway recently, we’ve just procured some NetApp kit at work and I decided that I was actually going to learn how to do this. So I downloaded the NetApp simulator, built a virtual machine, installed it and off I went.
All I can say is that it was some of the most geeky techie fun I’ve had in a long time but it was also incredibly easy to work with. Manuals, who needs manuals, the GUI is pretty intuitive and I could do almost everything from the GUI; first evening playing, I had NFS, CIFS and iSCSI Luns presented; all Snap-Enabled and all working well. Next evening, I had SnapMirror up and working between two Simulators running in VMs (I’ve got a stupidly over-powered desktop) and the following evening, I even had them clustered.
And the NetApp command line is nice and intuitive; start with typing a ‘?’ and move on from there.
I am most impressed with the work that NetApp have done ensuring that their interface is so intuitive and easy to use; the last interface I used in anger was IBM’s ESS and that just drove me to distraction with inconsistencies in syntax etc.
Next thing to play with is the Celerra simulator.
Perhaps its time to go back to technical again but I’m not sure anyone in my team will let me!
BTW, if anyone from NetApp is reading; any chance of you changing the simulator so that it can handle a decent amount of disk? I wouldn’t mind having a terabyte behind it and seeing if I can get it to dedupe some of my archives.
