NetApp

Northern Storage Suite’s benchmark NAS support is even further extended for Network Appliance NAS devices and Data ONTAP. This advanced support includes remote file blocking using NetApp’s fpolicy API and integration with ONTAP’s entry-level quota technology ‘quota rules’.

Northern Storage Suite has supported non-Windows Networked Attached Storage devices since early 2005. The suite’s integrated NAS engine is now in its fourth generation and offers the fastest, most scalable, quotas in the marketplace on all CIFS compliant NAS devices including EMC Celerra and Fujitsu Siemens FibreCat.

Northern Storage Suite V8 for NetApp delivers these key features to our NetApp customer base:
High Performance NAS Quotas
An advanced piece of software engineering that dramatically accelerates Northern Storage Suite’s response times in large NAS environments.

Specifically affecting real-time functionality [storage quotas], V8 maintains a fast access list of file and path sizes in memory. When a change occurs, instead of rescanning the quota path V8 simply adds the new size to the known size and immediately sends notifications, locks/unlocks the quota, etc.

This list, or file cache, is populated and updated as files are used, so NSS always remembers the most active files. Removing the need to re-scan significantly reduces network traffic and Disk I/O – Efficient and intelligent storage management.

On the technical side the cache size default is a maximum of 400,000 files per volume [56MB per volume] and can be edited through the registry.

Hybrid quotas
An even closer integration between Northern and NetApp offers a high performance combination of passive monitoring and active locking/unlocking.

Quota targets are monitored passively, guaranteeing zero impact on day-to-day file system activity and maximizing filer performance. When a target passes a locking threshold its priority rating is immediately increased; the object is locked and it is added to a high-priority monitoring list to guarantee immediate unlocking when usage decreases.

Hybrid quotas use Northern’s NSS Quota Server Service to monitor quota objects and NetApp’s FPolicy technology to lock/unlock.

User quota
Control usage by user account; within project or shared department folders.

Fpolicy-based file blocking quotas
Offering the ability to prevent specific file types from being saved. Non-intrusive extension-only filtering ensures close to zero lag.

NetApp quota rules
Viewing, setting and editing, allowing smooth migration for NetApp administrators who are using this built-in Data ONTAP technology.

REQUIREMENTS
A Windows host should be designated as the managing host for the filer[s] involved in the deployment. There are specific operating system requirements for the filer and as with generic CIFS compliant NAS devices Northern Storage Suite requires that the paths it will be managing are configured with pure CIFS or mixed CIFS/NFS security protocol support. NFS data cannot be managed.

The specific hardware and operating system requirements for management of NetApp NAS environments are detailed below: