Introduction
In 2012, the club received a donation of used filers and disk shelves from NetApp. The purpose of this page is to document some of the details about this equipment, including what equipment we have, details about it, etc.
What We Have
As of February 2013, the club has the following NetApp hardware:
- 4 FAS2040 filers
These are a combination filer head/disk shelf containing dual controllers and 12 300GB SAS disks. These disks contain NetApp specific firmware and can't be replaced with an off the shelf disk.
- 9 DS14mk2 disk shelves
Each of these contains 14 300GB Fibre Channel disks (hence the name DS14). These disks also contain NetApp specific firmware and can't be replaced with an off the shelf disk.
NetApp Filer Basics
A NetApp storage system is comprised of a head, and a number of disk shelves. There must be at least one disk shelf, but our FAS2040 filers have a built-in shelf and could be used standalone.
A head is the 'brains' of the system. It is a special purpose computer with several disk interface and Ethernet ports. NetApp filer heads run NetApp's operating system, Data ONTAP. The FAS2040 head contains dual controllers, intended to be used in a High Availability (HA) pair. The reason for this is that if one of the controllers malfunctions, the other controller (its partner) can take over its disks and continue serving data, albeit at reduced performance. Because of this, both of the controllers must have a path to all of the disks. Each FAS2040 controller has 4 gigabit Ethernet ports, two 4Gb/sec Fibre Channel ports (for DS14 Fibre Channel shelves - compatible with 1, 2 or 4Gb/sec shelves), and one SAS port (for newer NetApp disk shelves, the club doesn't own any of these shelves), a serial console port for management, and another Ethernet port also for management.
A disk shelf is just a box that contains hard disks and I/O interface modules (along with uninteresting things like sheet metal, fans, power supplies, and a large circuit board called a midplane that connects everything together). The DS14mk2 disk shelves we have use the ESH2 I/o module, a 2Gb/sec Fibre Channel module. Each I/O module has two Fibre Channel ports (In and Out), and each shelf has two I/O modules, enabling us to connect each shelf to both controllers.
Various Terminology
Data ONTAP - NetApp's storage operating system, based on FreeBSD.
LOADER Prompt - The prompt displayed by the NetApp bootloader. Ordinarily this will only show up if autoboot is turned off, or the system is unable to boot ONTAP. This is where you do things like setting environment variables, netbooting, etc. It looks like "LOADER-A>" or "LOADER-B>" depending on whether you're on controller A or B in a chassis, or just "LOADER>" on a single-controller chassis.
Baseband Management Controller (BMC) - A low-power embedded processor on the FAS2040 controller motherboard, allows remote administration as well as functions like cycling system power, etc. Other NetApp filer heads have a Service Processor (SP) or Remote LAN Module (RLM) that does the same thing. On old heads, the RLM is an optional expansion card.
ONTAP Prompt - The main prompt of the Data ONTAP operating system. This is where most administration will be done. It looks like "NAME-OF-FILER>".
Boot Menu - A menu available in the Data ONTAP boot process. This menu is used for booting to maintenance mode, upgrading ONTAP, wiping disks, etc. To access it, press CTRL+C when the "Press CTRL+C for Boot Menu" message appears during the ONTAP boot process. If ONTAP is already booted, you must reboot to access the boot menu, make sure this is really what you want to do.
Maintenance Mode - A mode in Data ONTAP selectable from the boot menu that is used for various administrative tasks such as assigning disks. The controller does not serve data while booted into maintenance mode.