NetApp AFX Hands-On Lab

Log into a live NetApp AFX storage cluster running in the WWT Advanced Technology Center AI Proving Ground and explore it using ONTAP System Manager. You will navigate the dashboard, examine how eight nodes are organized into high-availability pairs, review pre-staged workload volumes and their snapshot policies, and explore the SVM and its network interfaces. No configuration changes are required. This is a guided tour of a real, production-class AI storage platform.

Identify the four panels of the ONTAP System Manager dashboard and explain what each one communicates about cluster health, capacity, performance, and networking.

Describe the role of high-availability pairs in an ONTAP cluster and verify HA partner assignments and hardware health for all eight AFX-1K nodes.

Define a Storage Virtual Machine (SVM) and explain how logical interfaces (LIFs) provide NFS access to volumes, including how LIFs fail over transparently during node events.

Explain the purpose of ONTAP snapshot policies and distinguish between the default hourly/daily/weekly schedule and the weekly-only schedule applied to AI model checkpoint data.

Hardware

• NetApp AFX-1K - 8-node all-flash storage cluster

Software

• NetApp ONTAP 9.18.1P1