While you get settled – change – transformative -evolution
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Hello folks, come on in and grab a seat. I’d like to open with a question: By a show of hands, how many here have been a part of a technology upgrade? Excellent! Can anyone share a few details about their technology upgrade experience, like what was being upgraded, or maybe size of the project?
What did you have to do to get ready for that project?
I see. That is very cool, thank you for sharing that with us! A lot of the tasks that you just described sound really familiar. In fact, we are going to discuss some of those and similar topics today, and we are going to show you how your experience with technology upgrades have already helped you start your journey to ONTAP 9.
My name is Artie Noel, and I am a Principal Architect on NetApp’s Strategic Products and Accounts team. I’ve been in IT almost 20 years, and my current role is as a specialist that helps you decide the when and the how of moving to ONTAP 9.
You may have also seen my friend strutting around here. That’s Hadrian. Hadrian, could you take a moment and introduce yourself?
Thank you, Hadrian!
Again, welcome. This is The NetApp ONTAP 9 Transition Dictionary. Our goal with this session is to expose you to and help you get familiar with the common terms, processes, and tools that simplify transition to ONTAP.
Legal break: please take a few seconds and review the confidentiality notice. The gist is that information shared with you this week is general roadmap info, is subject to change at any time, and cannot be shared outside the event. Thank you all for taking those few moments.
With that, I’d like to set expectations for the session and the next 60 minutes
Walk through bullets with color.
We’ll be speaking for about 40 – 45 minutes, setting aside about 10 minutes for questions at the end of the session. We do have a lot of content to cover, so I ask that you hold your questions. If you could just note the slide number, and the question, we will be happy to take them at the end.
Sound good? Great, let’s get started!
I think the first question to ask when you are thinking about your ONTAP transition is, Are you ready for transition? Based on the responses earlier, and that you are here in this session, I’m betting that most of you are, or are pretty close. Let’s take just a few minutes to chat about what transition is, what it isn’t, and some of the things that can influence your transition planning.
NetApp def of transition
Migration is not transition, but a big part of it
Transition is a journey
And there is no better time to get started.
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Merriam Webster’s simple definition of transition is “ a change from one state or condition to another”. Dictionary.com further defines it as “the process or a period of changing from one state or condition to another”.
At NetApp, when we talk about transition, we are referring to the end-to-end journey of moving traditional 7-Mode or 3rd party storage infrastructure to ONTAP 9. Migration is a subset of transition, and we use it to refer to the act of moving data from a source system to an ONTAP 9 destination cluster. Migration is not equal to transition, but it is a big and important part of the transition journey and process.
And while migration is big, and important, and an event to look forward to and celebrate it’s completion, you can’t get to that step without knowing what you have, it’s current state and overall health, how it’s being managed, how it’s being monitored, how much of it there is, where it is and where you ultimately need it to be, how it’s being accessed and used, what and whom have access to it, and you get the point. You also can’t get to the migration phase without knowing where you want to go, why you want to go there, and what you expect to get once you get there. Then, once you know all that, you can start planning your actual migration, including HOW you plan on moving the data, who needs to be involved in the migration and cutover, will you have a window for on outage and/or downtime, does any of your data require any special handling due to regulatory or other business-specific requirements?
I know all of this sounds like a lot, and it is. But what it IS NOT is impossible, or unmanageable. It IS a journey, and before you take any journey, you need to assess your readiness for and plan the journey.
Before you can travel anywhere, you have to know where you are, and where you want to go. Getting to ONTAP is very similar. You need to understand your NetApp footprint, your storage ecosystem, how and who uses that ecosystem, why you want to move to ONTAP, if your ready to adopt ONTAP, and if you have all of the resources you need to accomplish the project.
Over the course of thousands of transitions, the NetApp field teams took the knowledge and experience being gained through those real-world transition events and distilled that into a repeatable approach to transition. That approach includes methods, processes, tools, and learning resources to facilitate successful transition projects. That approach has been documented and is available to customers (and partners). We have named that approach to transition the NetApp Unified Transition Methodology, or UTM.
The Unified Transition Methodology for customers is delivered as PDF document with links and actions to the resources aligned with each phase of the project. Your NetApp account team can help you get the Unified Transition Methodology playbook, and are ready and excited to work with you on your transition project
The Unified Transition Methodology consists of four top-level phases that you can see listed out on the screen: Assess, Prepare, Migrate, and Operate. As we continue through this session, I’m going to guide you through some of the activities that occur during a transition, and explain where they fit within the phases of the Unified Transition Methodology. For example, most of you are probably in either the Assess or prepare phase. Some of you may still be considering if ONTAP is the right move for you, and working on building out the business case for your transition. Others may have already made the decision to adopt ONTAP 9, and are here for information on how to get to ONTAP 9. For those of you who are looking for the “how”, we have several sessions dedicated to that topic, and I’ll call them out later in the session. Hadrian will also give you a primer into some of the tools we use that orchestrate several transition activities.
Assessing where you are today is a great beginning for your journey to ONTAP. Now you need to figure out here you’re going and why.
The next step is to involve your stakeholders and business partners. Talking with them about what they need from IT and how they expect that to improve their business can help you define requirements. You can use those conversations to start mapping ONTAP features to real business needs, and then associate those to expected business outcomes. It’s also a good time to talk with the members of the storage team, so that you can start getting an understanding of what the teams current knowledge of ONTAP us, and what training if any will be necessary for the team.
I’m sure each of you knows that ONTAP delivers non-disruptive operations, workload portability, scalability, and flash acceleration. And I am sure you can each tell me how each of those will make YOUR life easier. Being able to share that vision with infrastructure teams, application owners, and technical and business leadership garners better buy-in for the project. Buy-in leads to project creation and funding, and gets you prepared for the next step in your journey to ONTAP. Your NetApp partners and NetApp account teams can help you take this information and build a business case document you can use to win support for and initiate your ONTAP transition project. We typically see this activity occurring in the Assess phase of transition, and this helps you to propose your project and solution by mapping it to solving business problems.
As you can see here, there are a lot of great reasons to move to ONTAP 9. I’m not going to get into them all right now, and there are dozens of sessions on the features and functions within ONTAP 9, as well as how to design ONTAP 9 like a service provider. And these are the reasons you want to move to ONTAP, and these are the features that can accelerate your business as it transitions traditional datacenters into hybrid cloud service centers.
Question to the audience – can someone tell me what ONTAP transition is? I have swag for correct answers!
Excellent answer – thank you!
We have definitely covered what transition is, and we reinforced that with you by asking the question. We also discussed some activity as you begin your transition to ONTAP, and we talked for a second about the Unified Transition Methodology. I’d like to build on those subjects, and talk about some of the best practices for successful transitions that we have captured from hands-on experience, how they map to phases of the Unified Transition Methodology, and discuss how one of our customers used the Unified Transition Methodology to execute their transition.
Once Henrico Co had decided that ONTAP was the best solution to meet their business needs (increased uptime for critical applications), and had received buy-in and created their project they engaged their NetApp partner and NetApp account team. Using some of the tools I mentioned, like the Unified Transition Methodology, and some of the tools Hadrian will intro you to shortly, the Co IT team started preparing for their transition. They performed an in-depth assessment of their NetApp footprint, and determined what 7-Mode systems were in-scope for the transition. They reviewed the current operational health of those systems, and took steps to resolve warnings and errors in their environment. They reviewed a list of items we call “pre-checks” that list the options and configuration currently set for the 7-Mode environment, and provide guidance on how to achieve the same result in ONTAP. They list out items we refer to as “transition inhibitors”. Hadrian will speak a bit more about that in just a few minutes, I’ll cover it in more detail in a subsequent session, and my friend Steve Ryles will cover them in-depth in his session on Premier Migrations.
Audience poll: By a show of hands, how many of you are using NetApp’s SnapMirror data replication technology? Very cool, we are going to touch on replication now.
In this prepare phase, we also review the replication topology and validate that the list of systems in-scope are complete. Replication relationships are very important during the transition journey, and Hadrian will speak a bit more on that topic. We also have a session dedicated to transitioning replication relationships by Tony Paolucci that I highly recommend. Suffice to say, we have a tool that Hadrian is going to cover thathelps you manage those replication relationships during transition.
The prepare phase of transition is also a great time to start executing on any team training plans you put together in the assess phase. One strategy that has worked for a number of customers is to “seed” an ONTAP clusters in their environment. This proves useful in many ways. First, it gives you and your storage team the opportunity to get hands-on time with ONTAP. It also allows you to begin any qualification or acceptance programs required to deploy a new system in your environment. Speaking of environment, now that we have a good idea of what the NetApp footprint looks like…
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It’s time to keep traveling through the prepare phase, and take a look at the wider ecosystem that leverages your storage infrastructure. As I mentioned earlier, talking with stakeholders early in the project can help drive requirements. It can also help you define your migration approach, and we’ll chat a bit more on that in just minute. As we plan our cluster design, it is important to understand the services and applications your NetApp environment supports. Some applications, Like Microsoft Exchange and VMware, have known service design principals. Others, like custom applications, need deeper analysis so the target ONTAP cluster can be designed to support that and future workloads.
Understanding the applications in use will also help you determine migration strategy for certain workloads. It will also help you identify if there are application challenges that you need to address prior to migration and/or cutover, which we’ll talk about shortly. Having a solid understanding of the applications and workloads you host will also help you identify opportunities to provide better integration, data motion, and data protection solutions. We integrate with a network of vendors, and those integrations can add value to your application owners This is a great time to include those elements into your cluster design.
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Final readiness. I know we spoke about readiness earlier, but, before you migrate, you need to check a few final items. If you haven’t started your training plan, now's a good time to do that. You also need to review your current operational process and procedures. The transition to ONTAP is a great time to look for ways those process can be optimized or even automated. Maybe you’ve already automated a lot of your day-to-day. It’s a really good idea to review any scripting or automation tools and validate those scripts/process are supported with ONTAP. You will likely need to update runbooks that dictate how your environment operates to reflect the new technology.
One of the items several customer have done has been to request that NetApp partners or services work with them throughout the transition project. This gets them access to some of our internal tools that can help build documentation for your environment. This is definitely a value –add, and those tools provide automated interfaces to do just that.
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I had just mentioned services, and now, as you are getting ready to move into the migrate phase, it makes a great segue. Over the past few years, NetApp has iterated the transition process, improving existing tools and building new tools to expedite transition and close out gaps between 7-Mode and ONTAP. A lot of that work has made transition easier and more approachable today than ever before. Those tools have the goal of enabling you to perform a “self-service” transition. With the latest releases of tools and ONTAP, you are empowered and capable of running your own transition projects. This is even more true smaller environments, or in your small branch offices that have simple configurations.
For those who want to do it on their own, but, would like guided training, NetApp partners and NetApp services can help you define a transition approach for your environment, help walk you through your first couple of transition events, and then you can own the process forward. That’s the teach-you-to-fish approach. Some of our largest customer decide to purchase a full-service turnkey transition solution. This typically happens in very large, global environments where the scope of the project requires additional bodies because the internal team is keeping the lights on during the project execution.
All of these are valid, effective approaches to effecting your journey to ONTAP.
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I know, I’ve said it at least a dozen times. Well, now, here’s Hadrian to take that best practices conversation to the next level, and layer in some tools and their benefits for you. Take it away, Hadrian!
Before I get into the meat of moving the actual bits as there are lots of tools to do that, let’s talk about a few of the important planning tools you should be aware of.
Unified Parser is great to use early in the planning process, as it can provide a detailed but fast NetApp inventory so you can begin tasks like planning replication, etc. We launched this last year and have been getting rave reviews, it just needs a NetApp login and you could do it from your chair right now.
7MTT is installed on a server, linux or windows, and is our free migration tool which splits into two parts – migration execution and discovery. The discovery piece
is called Collect & Assess, and that’s what it does. It interrogates your 7-mode controllers and SAN clients and provides two valuable pieces of information –
1. Prechecks are pre flight checks, very important for 7toC
2. 7MTT can automatically check the IMT for san clients as well.
So a show of hands – who in the audience has any Non-NetApp storage? We’re not going to be angry about it, don’ be shy. The good news is we have planning and migration tools to support migrating to ONTAP9 regardless of where you are coming from.
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We have lots of customers who are excited to adopt ONTAP9 and migrate from non NetApp environments, and OnCommand Insight is the tool of choice to discover and therefore prepare a third party migration. This is really a enterprise, heterogeneous SAN management and reporting tool which has a lot of powerful features to make sure your Tier1 SAN deployment is in tip top shape. It also has some good NAS features, but in context of migration planning we generally use this for SAN migration prep work because it helps with:
SAN array and SAN host inventory
And SAN LUN performance – from deciding where to place workloads, to deciding how many shelves we may need, and also to prove to your business users latency is improving post transition. Which can help them get on the bus and excited to support your migration planning work – very important.
To wrap this slide up, Unified Parser and 7MTT are free tools, OCI is actually a heterogenous storage management product that NetApp sells, however demos and evaluations are always possible, make sure to ask about these options from your account team.
So for migration tools, we split them up into four groups.
Host based tools are installed on a server and the data moving actually passes through that migration host. Robocopy and rsync are the ones most people are familiar with as they are free, they work pretty well, and they’ve been around forever.
But I wanted to let you know of some changes to this – XCP is a new offering that was released to the public almost a year ago and it is amazing at NFS migrations from any to NetApp, or also it is being developed for any to Cloud migration. It is really, really fast, on the order of 25x faster than rsync at moving large file count environments, think of an Isilon with millions of files. XCP is great for that. And I’ll shout out our NetApp sponsors, we do lots of migration projects using StorageX and Peersync those are both great products generally used for NAS migration.
Appliances are rack mounted devices which you’d insert into your fabric or network and are historically used for any to any lun migrations. They are great, they work well and for third party migrations we’ve had a long partnership with Qlogic.
This third category in red is Application based, and in migration projects we look out for these options as they tend to be non-disruptive or short cutover capable. Everyone hopefully knows about storage vMotion with VMware, and Exchange DAGs. This is one of the big reasons we spend a lot of time looking at the inventory reports early on, because we want to know if we can use these features early on. We have to see with the app owners if they can support these migrations, or if not do we want to teach them to fish as Artie put it, and help enable the app owners to move the data themselves using Oracle ASM or MS-SQL tricks.
But this is a NetApp conference so lets talk more about the NetApp tools, which we show as NetApp Controller Based.
Foreign LUN Import – FLI – is a feature that we released as part of the ONTAP operating system, built-in no charge, that supports Fibre Chanel LUN migrations from third parties. So no more renting SAN migration appliances. It is a huge cost saver, and the best part about it besides the price is it supports online migrations, meaning you take one reboot of your SAN client to put the NetApp node in path, and after that the data is migrated in the background. No long disruptions to move your big DB servers.
We talked about 7-mode transition tool already in the planning context, for the migration piece when you install it it will ask you Copy Free or Copy Based. Copy Based Transition is a front end to NetApp SnapMirror, as SnapMirror will do a block for block copy of your data, snapshots, retaining storage efficiencies and dedupe savings from your 7-mode environment. Also with a very fast cutover compared to most other tools. Distinguish this from Copy Free Transition, where the data never gets copied, but 7-MTT tool will direct you step by step to actually plug in your 7-mode shelves into the NetApp ONTAP9 cluster, and help automate all the work to import those shelves, provision the destination appropriately. Copy Free Transition has been GA’d since January and already we’ve seen a lot of successes with it.
So NetApp 7-MTT has been out for 4 years, that’s 4 years of innovating and improving the abitlity to automate the migration steps.
NetApp created this tool to enable Enterprise to self migrate their environment, so it has to have a lot of checks and balances to ensure the migration goes smooth, much more than any other tool we’ve talked about.
We’ve kept adding to what it automates, much more than provisioning of SnapMirror jobs, to provisioning of the target storage, to setting up export permissions and importing local users.
So you can see from these numbers 7MTT has been getting a lot of use, 12,000 controllers moved, hundreds of petabytes migrated. This is the tool we have our customers use, and we even use it in Professional Services because of all the Prechecks. The Prechecks are the key.
And not just because of its precheck features, but 7MTT supports all the different destinations incarnations that ONTAP9 provides,
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Where its in the datacenter,a flexpod or AFF, a remote office with virtualzed ONTAP select, or cloud/near-cloud, 7mtt will support it as a destination.
Just as ONTAP9 is that same tool to run in all places, 7MTT will support migrating to them as well.
It is your secret weapon, your ring of power. Your one ring to rule them all!
Artie, take it away!
We’d like to conclude our part of the talk for today with a brief review. We started out by defining what ONTAP transition is, how data migration fits into transition, and the key elements of a successful transition. Once we had established where we were going, we moved into defining frameworks and methodologies, and learning how those process tools enable repeatable, successful transitions to ONTAP. From there, we took our map and navigation guide, and Hadrian led us into the tools we can use to help us on our journey, and showed us how those tools, bundled with our map and nav guide, can simplify and streamline the ONTAP transition process, helping us to complete a successful journey to ONTAP!
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We sincerely thank you for joining us and your participation today! My challenge to you now is to expand the knowledge we started building here, and join me in session 85735-2: Planning Guide: How Do I Get from 7-Mode to ONTAP 9? It is scheduled for <give schedule>
Also, if you are new to NetApp, and are curious about transitioning from a 3rd party array, please check out session 51231-2. Todd Edgel will be discussing field-proven best practices for moving data from 3rd party arrays to ONTAP.
If you have more questions about ONTAP transition, please visit us in the Meet the Transition Experts Booth, and check out transition.netapp.com for more information.
With that, I’d like to spend the next 10 minutes or so…
…taking your questions. And while I standby that we have answers, I will caveat that by also saying that answer could be “I don’t know.”
If there is one thought I leave you with, it is this: I began this talk with a mention about the Olympics. If we learned something from those athletes, it was that while the journey is fun, the preparation is all bout getting to the goal(d) . ONTAP 9 is your goal, and we can get you there.
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Like those athletes who started preparing for their journey to Rio many years ago, thorough, accurate preparation is the key to achieving a successful ONTAP transition. However, unlike those athletes, you can take advantage of the methodologies and tools NetApp has developed to accelerate your preparation and simplify your transition to ONTAP 9!
Thank you all again. See you in the next session!
