In my role as a Consulting SE for RoundTower, I often perform assessments of our customers' storage environments. When those customers use NetApp storage and it's under support, I have a wealth of tools at hand via the ActiveIQ portal to help understand how they use they manage their storage systems and the data they hold. Unfortunately, I often find myself working with customers that I don't have direct partner-level access to their systems via the ActiveIQ portal or the customer has perhaps held some systems well past their expected service life and they're running with 3rd party hardware replacement support only.
Intro I often do work with customers moving legacy NetApp 7-mode systems to current ONTAP. This is termed as transition In NetApp parlance and they provide extensive tools to evaluate, plan and execute a transition. In the ideal situation, NetaApp's 7mTT tool is used to orchestrate all of the transition work. However, customer systems and requirements may not make that entirely possible. Customers may have old 32-bit aggregates and volumes, for example, and they may not want to negotiate an additional maintenance window to upgrade an old 7-mode filer to a new version to gain the capability to update those aggregates to 64-bit.
I do some work with customers transitioning from 7-mode to modern ONTAP (Clustered Data OnTap). When you transition with the excellent 7mtt tool it helpfully transitions snapshots made on the source system to the new system and optionally will duplicate the snapshot schedule on the old system using the new snapshot policies capability. However, the old snapshots from 7-mode are not automatically rolled off. Removal of those old snapshots is left to the administrator.