A lot of the posts on this blog use CLI commands, very
few use the GUI, and I wonder if some readers reading this blog, look at the posts
and think “that looks complicated.” Well, the truth is that it is all very simple,
and I hope I present things simply and straight to the point without waffling
on unnecessarily (this post is a bit of an exception, one of my rare waffle
posts.) CLI is like a language but much easier (easy tab completion, and the
use of “?”, don’t exist in any verbal language I know of), and if every language
was as easy as Clustered ONTAP, then I’d surely have mastered conversational
language skills in more languages than just my native tongue.
I don’t (or hardly ever) use the OnCommand System Manager
GUI in my blog for two reasons:
1) Much easier, quicker, and more efficient, to document CLI
commands than take innumerable screenshots of pointing at things in a GUI.
2) I like using the CLI - its good fun!
That’s essentially why I use the CLI. Pretty much
everything - but not quite - that I post in this blog using the CLI could very
easily and simply have been done using the highly intuitive OnCommand
System Manager GUI (now at version 3.0.)
Learning the
CLI is a must do for the serious IT Professional. It is very easy in small environments to get away with just
using GUIs, but as things scale, it becomes a massive benefit, almost a
necessity, to get a grasp of the CLI. Like a spoken language, with practice,
CLI becomes second nature. And there are also reasons why IT Professionals
prefer CLI, such as precision: it’s always very precise in that you know
exactly what’s going on - you type a command and the command is processed - versus when you click on the GUI and you’re never quite sure what magic is going on in
the background.
Microsoft’s Server Operating Systems and Application
Servers have moved more and more towards having powerful CLIs, and for good
reason: for more efficient administration and increased automation - especially
for large Enterprise systems. Cisco Network Professionals have traditionally
always used CLI. And of course anyone from a UNIX/Linux - “a proper operating
system (with no Windows GUI)”* - background has been brought up using the CLI.
*Quoting a UNIX-y
someone!
Now I come to my titular comment of “Why NetApp
Clustered ONTAP is Awesome!” Well, I’m not a salesman, never have been, and
never will be, so I’m not trying to sell you anything here. And there are many
reasons why Clustered ONTAP is awesome - such as it’s taken the most highly
featured and flexible storage operating system in the world (Data ONTAP) and
enhanced it by making it cluster-able, thus removing the need to manage things
at a storage controller level, and massively improving on the already very
popular CLI - but here I’m just going to focus on one point.
What can I manage from one powerful CLI session?
From one very powerful but simple to use CLI session (tab
completion makes life very easy and “?” is your friend in the CLI), I can
manage up to nearly 70PB of raw storage capacity!
From the NetApp Hardware Universe (http://hwu.netapp.com/Controller/Index),
the current top of the range NetApp FAS series controller, the FAS6290, has a
max raw capacity of 5760TB per HA-pair. Now, Clustered ONTAP can have up to 24
nodes or 12 HA-Pairs, and 5760TB x 12 is nearly 70PB.
Image: FAS6290
specs for Clustered Data ONTAP 8.2
And what would 70PB served by 12 HA-Pairs of FAS6290 look
like using the high density DS4486 shelves with 4TB drives (that’s 192TB in a
4U shelf)?
Image: 70PB
Clustered ONTAP 24-Node NAS Storage Cluster on DS4486 with 4TB drives and one
storage admin!
One CLI session controlling 24 nodes!
NAC1::> cluster show
Node Health Eligibility
--------- --------
------------
NAC1-01 true true
NAC1-02 true true
NAC1-03 true true
...
NAC1-22 true true
NAC1-23 true true
NAC1-24 true true
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