This week in his blog, Val provided a sneak preview of a product that's consumed most of my time for the past few months.
We call it NetApp System Manager.
I've been busy helping to get it ready for release (when? soon - it will be available in a few months). Once we get closer to release, I'll have a series of posts describing the numerous areas in which we've made improvements to storage system management.
If you happen to be attending VMworld Europe, you should be able to get a preview. You might ask to see our wizard for NFS datastores - you just need to enter the size of the datastore you want, and your ESX server(s). Everything else, including best practice settings, come automatically.
It's really that simple.
In a similar fashion, if like you like simple setup procedures, we've condensed initial system configuration down to two short pages. In fact, all you need is a host name and you're up and running with all licensed protocols.
System setup is really that simple, too.
NetApp System Manager is a Windows application implemented as a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in. We chose that architecture to suit the many Windows administrators who have specifically requested it, as well as to achieve tighter integration with Windows in general. Most everyone should find it easy to install and use.
For those of you who previously enjoyed my tutorial on VMware, I promise a series of posts with a similar level of detail for System Manager.
Soon ... boss reminds me I need to wrap up a few things, first.
(Thanks for reading - Steve Klinkner)

Impressive stuff. Really looking forward to it's post-beta release.
Awesome post dude.
Thx!
Posted by: Daniel | March 02, 2009 at 06:33 PM
Nick Triantos has posted some additional screen shots and descriptions
http://blogs.netapp.com/storage_nuts_n_bolts/2009/03/sneak-preview-netapp-system-manager-nsm.html
Looks like I have some catching up to do :-)
Steve
Posted by: Steve Klinkner | March 03, 2009 at 05:04 PM