Chapter 1: What are the main topics covered in this episode?
This episode of the Tech on Tap podcast, we talk CDOT migrations with Hadrian Barron of the migration team. Welcome to the Tech on Tap podcast. Hello and welcome to the Tech on Tap podcast. My name is Justin Parisi. Glenn Sizemore is not here today. He had something better to do, but Andrew Sullivan, we found him. I have returned. Where have you been? I've been in Boston.
Feels like the first time? I feel wicked smart. Yeah, I don't think you do. And lots of lobster.
Stop. You're alienating our Bostonian listeners. If Glenn was in here, he'd be very angry at you right now.
Probably. But Glenn's from Boston. That's why he'd be angry at you. He gave me several excellent restaurant recommendations.
Did he? Did he also tell you never to try to use a Bostonian accent? Because he should have.
No, pretty much everybody has told me that because I'm terrible at it. I speak two languages, right? Bad English and poor English. Yeah, that's about right. Cool. Good to hear. So how was Boston? It was beautiful. I very much enjoyed it. I discovered that Sam Adams produces several beers that are only available in Boston. That was quite the treat. Interesting. Yeah. So, yeah, I had a great time.
Red Hat Summit, OpenStack Summit, both excellent conferences, both a lot of fun. A whole lot of summits. Indeed. I got to see lots of Fenway.
Yeah, that's right. You guys did a Fenway Park pack. I'm not going to do it. I'm terrible at it, too. Fenway Park thing. I guess there was a giant NetApp ad on the billboard I saw.
There was. It was actually a pretty interesting one as well. I don't remember the exact saying, but I remember giggling at it when I saw it.
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Chapter 2: How does Hadrian Baron define his role in migrations?
So when you do an analysis, are you also analyzing the file structures as well as the options?
Yeah, that's a great question. So there's kind of two parts of it, right? So with... With any migration, you know, say this is like a NAS migration where maybe we're talking about, we want to know how many shares there are, how many CIFS shares, how much of it is multi-protocol, you know, both CIFS and NFS at the same time on the same share.
You know, that's obviously the first step of knowing what is my source and what is going to be the target. Then after that, sometimes we'll go and understand how many files it is or, If it's a really deep structure and it took a long time to migrate it to where it is sitting right now, how might we break things up or how might we clean up?
Sometimes customers don't want to move 20-year-old NAS data to a really expensive place. You know all flash disk right, so they might go in and try to split things out so when we do that we use a tool called net app xcp so we've built xcp in house there's some really cool proprietary proprietary technology and there that will.
massively parallelize the job scans, right, walking the file system of the NAS environment and go and show you who's the top owners, you know, how old is the data, when was it last accessed, you know, how much of the data hasn't been touched in, you know, two years or whatever.
So then they can go and decide, you know what, let's not migrate that, you know, that two-year-old or that 10-year-old data over. Or let's, you know, move off some of this stuff to some other, you know, slower disk.
Yeah, and that's actually a scan, not an actual copy. So you can actually do it before you move anything and get an idea of what you have before you start moving it around, right?
Yeah, that's right. So XCP scans... are really valuable for knowing. Sometimes when, say, we look at an Isilon environment, maybe they're not paying for quotas, I know. Sometimes they used to have to buy quotas. But knowing how big it is first is one of the keys. And then after that, knowing what is the structure within it so we can decide, does this make sense to stick it on a flex volume?
Does it make sense to stick it on a flex group if it's really big? And so on and so forth.
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Chapter 3: What challenges do customers face during data migrations?
This is really just like that operational thing. So the first thing that we do is we make it really clear here at NetApp, most multi-protocol situations, they'll be making sure that you have a user mapping. And when there's not a user mapping, then we will go and default to that guest user, that default Windows or default Unix user. And then after that, we leverage the implicit name mapping.
So if you have an AD account that is, say, Hadrian, then I'm going to go and look up an LDAP for the same Unix UID. So the key thing is to know that mixed mode and kind of the oddball multi-protocol setups are 99% time not needed. Most customers can be fine just choosing one target
ackle right whether it's ntfs or mode bits with unix and then main mapping from there this is all your area of expertise i don't know i don't know any of this stuff well i'm sitting here quietly what is this multi-protocol mixed mode stuff the niffs yeah the niffs yeah so we help customers um
You know understand that that key point right that just because it's mixed on the source doesn't mean that it needs to be mixed on the target. So really, at the end of the day, it most customers just want to get at their data right they don't necessarily you know, like an end user that's sitting.
And HR is not thinking like, you know what, it'd be great if this one file had both Munich's permissions and NTFS permissions because that makes life really easy for the administrator and for me too. Oh, Gladys and HR?
You mean Gladys and HR?
Yeah. No one kind of starts their day thinking like that, and yet these environments kind of end up like this when they're on EMC. And so really that's the key message is to say, you know what, as long as they can get the data, they can edit it, they can delete what they need to delete if they're allowed, then that is step one.
So in certain situations where, say, I have an ice salon and I have one chair, and I want to move that to one share on the target onto NetApp, then some of it will be UNIX permissions, some of it will be SIFS permissions. So what we do is we'll do one of those file scans, right, with XCP scan or storage, you know, data dynamic storage X has another file insight tool, which is great for this.
and go and look at, you know, what is all the data in here? Which ones of it needs to be in TFS? And then we'll migrate those specifically. So usually the migration tool that you choose is going to lay down the permissions based on the OS it's running.
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Chapter 4: How is the migration team utilizing automation tools?
How many shares is it? How big are they? What type of data? Who accesses it? And most storage administrators can kind of eyeball this stuff and they'll know. But like you said, when you have a jack of all trades, maybe they have to kind of dig into it. But that is a really valuable time spent.
And then after that, understanding how we're going to lay it out on the target, whether it's all in one volume, maybe like a flex group or multiple volumes or flex groups and flex balls on the same box. You can do that, right, Justin?
Yes, you can do it on the same SVM.
Yep. Same SVM event. So, um, after that, the other key is, especially for NAS migrations, you know, Sam has this perception that it's like really crazy hard, but with foreign land import being free on box, um, and online migrations, um, they are really trivial. Um, with NAS, we have to do things like make sure, um, authentication is working really well.
right, making sure my name mapping is working really well. So making sure the target system is healthy is one of those, you know, key milestones that we always look for before we do that first cutover.
And that's why we always recommend doing a pilot migration or, you know, new storage requests, go to the new platform, making sure that, you know, that greenfield environment is healthy before we go in and cut over, you know, GLADIS and HR's, you know, departmental file share. We don't want to make HR angry, so. We want those big cutovers to be seamless, right, which is why we test up front.
So aside from the technical aspect of literally moving the data and moving the connections from old to new, do you see any issues? Do you encounter issues with tool sets, tool chains that have been built up around the old system, regardless of whether it was NetApp 7 mode or anything else? Right. And are there any any tools or processes in place in order to assist that?
You know, I'm thinking automation tools, right, or capacity management tools, change management tools, et cetera.
Yeah, that's absolutely. That's part of that whole ecosystem of, you know, beyond the array. What else is there that needs updating? So automation and like hard coded IPs, stuff like that are, you know, oftentimes what? But we'll go in and start thinking about and really that that comes to you know what is this data that's moving you know, are there applications that are accessing it so.
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Chapter 5: What are the benefits of using FlexGroup volumes?
They hit the little heart. And I don't know if they love love us or they just like us.
It's the advantage of having a binary system. You either really love us or really hate us.