NetApp IT ONTAP automation journey

INSIGHT Presentation 2024

In today's fast-paced IT landscape, automation has become a key enabler for boosting efficiency, reducing operational complexity, and improving resiliency. At NetApp, our journey towards storage automation has been a multi-phased process, with each step significantly enhancing our infrastructure and addressing evolving business needs. I’m excited to share key aspects of NetApp IT's storage automation journey and how we've successfully harnessed automation to enhance our operations.

At the outset of our automation journey, we understood that automation isn't a one-size-fits-all approach. Each step requires tailored strategies that align with unique business needs and dynamic environments. As with any automation process, our approach has evolved, becoming more strategic as we learn and adapt.

In the early stages, our automation efforts focused primarily on configuration management and enforcing standards. As we matured, we expanded our scope to automate manual processes, address pain points, and develop playbooks for critical tasks like new system configurations and upgrades.

Automation offers numerous benefits—time savings, reduced risk of human error, and more consistent configuration management, to name a few. At NetApp IT, we’ve experienced these benefits firsthand. However, automation also brings its own challenges. One of the key pain points we’ve encountered is ensuring the seamless integration of automation tools into existing workflows and addressing edge cases that don’t fit neatly into automated processes.

Despite these challenges, we have identified automation opportunities that we believe will help improve efficiency of time-consuming, manual processes and the inefficient use of storage resources, such as:

• End-of-support Node Evacuations: Automating the migration of NAS volumes and SVM management LIFs and ensuring cluster peer relationships are updated during decommissioning processes.
• Orphan Volume Cleanups: Identifying and decommissioning volumes that are no longer in use or have no IOPS, reducing storage waste.
• Pre-Upgrade Checks: We are expanding pre-upgrade checks to ensure that SAN hosts are multipath-configured, cluster switch versions are supported, and firmware is up to date. These checks help us avoid potential disruptions during system upgrades.

Real-world examples best illustrate automation success. One notable success story for NetApp IT involves the automatic increase of inode limits in response to utilization alerts. This playbook enables us to increase inode limits by 10%, up to a maximum of 1.8 billion files, without manual intervention. Another success is the automation of new system configurations—what once took hours to complete manually can now be done in minutes.

We’ve also developed playbooks that enforce consistency across our environment, ensuring settings like Snapshot policies, SnapMirror policies, and storage efficiency configurations are correctly configured according to our standards. This automation helps us maintain compliance and security while reducing the risks of configuration drift.

One of the most impactful areas of our automation journey has been the development of Ansible playbooks for configuring new ONTAP nodes. Before automation, configuring a new cluster could be a time-consuming and error-prone process. Thanks to automation, we can configure clusters with speed, precision, and consistency.

Our playbooks handle everything from renaming nodes and configuring VLANs to creating custom broadcast domains and enabling features like security auditing and event forwarding. We’ve also automated the cleanup of default broadcast domains, ensuring our environment always aligns with our standard network configurations.

In one example, our playbook for configuring a new cluster performs a wide range of tasks:

1. Renaming nodes and aggregates to match our standard naming conventions.
2. Configuring service processors (BMCs) and setting up network ports with standard flow control, speed, and MTU settings.
3. Creating VLANs and broadcast domains to ensure properly configured network segmentation.
4. Moving LIFs to appropriate ports and correctly applying DNS, SNMP, and security settings.

The result is a fully configured, ready-to-use ONTAP cluster that meets our exacting standards. What used to take hours to configure now takes just minutes, reducing the risk of human error and ensuring consistency across our environment.

As we continue to mature our automation efforts, we're looking to expand in several key areas:

• Capacity and Lifecycle Management: Reducing manual steps for analyzing growth trends and managing end-of-support hardware to improve planning and budgeting.
• Network Redundancy: Ensuring proper network redundancy configurations to avoid disruptions during network maintenance or upgrades.
• Enhanced Pre-Upgrade Checks: We are further automating our pre-upgrade processes to include a deeper analysis of potential configuration issues that could cause downtime.

Our journey with storage automation at NetApp IT has highlighted the immense potential for improving efficiency, resiliency, and consistency across our storage environment. By automating manual processes, enforcing standards, and continuously refining our playbooks, we've scaled our operations and reduced the risk of errors.

As we look to the future, automation will remain a central focus of our strategy. It will help us meet the evolving demands of our infrastructure and ensure that we continue to deliver high-quality service to our internal and external stakeholders.

For more insights into NetApp IT’s automation journey, stay tuned for more sessions and updates from NetApp on NetApp, and visit our website for additional resources.

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