NetApp: I had never heard of this company

… so I thought I mention it here. Maybe Storj is already well aware of them and is working on something with them. They seem to offer several products:




Wasabi S3 can be used with it:
https://wasabi-support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040142152-How-do-I-use-NetApp-ONTAP-Select-with-Wasabi-

Currently they have as storage partner mostly:

But one can partner with them here.

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NetApp is a large company that manufactures servers, storage systems and software for enterprises. Similar to Dell EMC and HPE.

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Hi @jammerdan
thanks! It looks like they have some good familiar names with partnerships, so it sounds very interesting

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Yeah, definitely one of the biggest players in storage systems.
If you manage to cooperate with them, STORJ will sky rocket :slight_smile:

But I know them from my daily business…they are very high standard and expensive!

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Yes, sounds very interesting.
But if you look at the picture of their Ontap manager, there is already an option to add like all other S3 services like Wasabi.

So in case this maybe works out of the box with Tardigrade, Storj could at least publish such a support site like Wasabi and list all kind of different services Tardigrade can be used already natively and how. I think Wasabi does that very clever with their support documents for all kinds of different services.

But of course, if Storj could really partner with them in and be named like AWS/Azure/GCloud that would be much better.

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NetApp is like big enough that they sold their own special sauce 520Byte sector size HDD’s.
duno if they are as huge a thing as they were tho, but it must have been pretty huge to be able to do hardware checksums on your data many years ago, thats what the 8 bytes extra on each sector was for, a checksum so that one could verify the data was correct via NetApp Storage hardware, so basically 512byte data + 8byte checksum.
haven’t heard of any other company running this kind of setup.

it’s what today would be known as hyperscaling and well specialist companies like that really have no interest in advertising to the common folk, the reason most of us even know netapp is because of all the old netapp hardware on ebay :smiley:

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Yup, a used DS4243/4246 is about as cheap as it gets for adding storage to an existing server.

And, yeah, they’ve been around forever in the enterprise world.

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They did use available technology for it though, some enterprise drives can be formatted to 512, 520 and 528 byte sectors, 4k~ ones can be formatted to 4096, 4160 and 4224 byte sectors. Firmware works with several sizes, you just have to low level reformat (and truly low level reformat in this case) the drive to recreate the low level structure. I assume it’s pretty common in high availability enterprise setups, but unnecessary for everything else as it eats into the capacity…

And yeah, eBay is a great place to find these!

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maybe, i was trying to figure out who started the whole 520B thing, but was difficult to find… only thing i did manage to find about it was that NetApp sold their own brand 520B sector HDD’s back in the day.
to my understanding one of their main selling points was the whole checksum deal…
ofc that doesn’t mean they developed it.

i suppose the platters are basically the same today, but atleast initially it wasn’t possible to format a 512B to 520B but you could always format a 520B to 512B because you aren’t forced to use the entire sector.
today i doubt the sectors are truly hardware limitations, aside from maybe the PCB on the HDD will have some standards it upholds.

wouldn’t at all surprise me if they had a standard “platter sector” type deal, so they can simply switch around the sectore sizes as they want…
ofc there may be some limitations, and performance related stuff to this also,

to my understanding atleast from the older versions of the tech, because you can go from 520 to 512 and not the other way around, then if your disks are 520B then you would ofc want to run them in 520B and if they where 512B then you couldn’t run them in 520B

i sure wouldn’t mind if my data wouldn’t get damaged from me moving it around… it’s why i got into all this storage stuff got so annoyed that after spending a lot of time sorting stuff it would end up degraded years later because i erroneously assumed that it was stored in a reliable way.

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Sure, data integrity is never a bad idea, especially when it takes up so little space. This is similar to ECC RAM, but at a different ratio. I assume this would basically prevent bit rot and unrecoverable read errors (probably why they use it). Any kind of mechanical failure is likely to wipe the whole/multiple sector material and any other device failures will destroy the whole drive usually. Safer to have some kind of RAID if you want to store valuable data. And/or backup.
I mean none of it is a bad idea, the more protection, the better usually (as long as the drives don’t cost double or triple, else it defeats the point).

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