NetApp - Exposed

NewsFLASH: Spring SNW Orlando Preview

If you’re an “IT storage person”, next week is gonna be a fun storage geekfest at the Rosen Shingle Creek Resort in Orlando.  Whether you’re into Dedupe, FCoE, Multi-Vendor Storage Array Interoperability, Flash or Storage Standards in general, NetApp will be omnipresent at this year’s Spring Storage Networking World show organized by SNIA & ComputerWorld.

Cloud & Virtualization will be two of the dominant themes at the show, but the theme I’m most excited about is of course Solid State Storage.

Efficiency Unleashed

One of our most sought-after customer-facing advocates is also a Consulting Systems Engineer.  Last summer Mike Riley started a popular internal blog for NetApp employees and partners.  As a longtime fan, I've bugged him to spread his unparalleled wisdom and wit with a wider audience ever since.

Today I'm thrilled to announce I've worn him down and Mike has launched a public blog focused on the hottest possible customer topic around.  I proudly welcome you to NetApp's Storage Efficiency Insights Blog!

Mike is stacking the deck by making this a group blog where he has assembled an awesome collection of NetApp storage talent to add their insights and help customers / architects / consultants / integrators / etc... realize maximum infrastructure efficiency.

Oh and one last warning to our competitor's bloggers.  You will soon realize after reading this new blog that we've been holding back until now.  Mike and team will certainly try to be merciful when they spot spiteful FUD-filled content-free comments or blogs about NetApp, but their infectious wit is hard to contain.  At least now you've been warned :)

Solid State Storage – the Sinatra Way

NetApp has built our business on leading via innovation, instead of following conventional wisdom.  In our earliest days, we bypassed file-serving via a general-purpose OS in favor of an efficient stripped down micro-kernel which delivers far more performance and efficiency, while offering more stability without the extra code bloat.  We chose native kernel-mode protocol implementations for NFS and CIFS instead of user-mode protocol emulation.  That enabled maximum performance and even true multi-protocol locking on the same file if necessary.

Thinovation

Other even more profound innovations feature the industry’s only RAID without compromise (enabling maximum performance, availability and efficiency in the same configuration), giving life to low-cost ATA technology in enterprise settings.  We stood out with native Thin functionality (Provisioning / Cloning / Replication) implemented at the core of our I/O engine to elegantly complement our still-exclusive dedupe capabilities on ALL tiers of storage, featuring primary instead of merely backup and archive.

Deep application integration and scalable policy-based management helps you actually apply this storage innovation to your most common enterprise apps.  Modular and consistent controller architectures with in-place upgrades make these sometimes exotic features all the more approachable to every IT department.

Unified Storage 2.0

The advent of Solid State announcements among Enterprise Storage vendors over the past year offered NetApp once again an opportunity to bypass conventional wisdom.  So we chose to redefine the concept of Unified Storage which NetApp coined years ago with our first combined SAN/NAS/iSCSI array.

Welcome to NetApp Unified Storage 2.0 -  doing Solid State Storage – our way.

Transition - Past is Prologue

Continuing with my Obama theme for a bit, the beginning of 2009 offers us more political and economic limbo.  Yet for the IT infrastructure industry and storage in particular, there are numerous lessons that emerged at the end of 2008 which we can apply as we sit down with our peers to figure out 2009.

Three sources in particular are worth paying attention to as we look for a common theme to emerge.

The Recession of 2008 - Summarized in 8 Short Minutes

Like a slow motion train wreck, I can't stop watching CNBC lately in order to witness what I hope is (only this once) in-a-lifetime worldwide stock market crash.  The implications for the storage economy are vast, but before I pontificate on the topic in more detail later this week, I encourage a quick read of Dave's and Marc's respective takes.

Candor is a NetApp hallmark and I am proud of how our executives are resisting the shallow and superficial tendency of some competitors to feign indifference to the burning of Rome around them.

NetApp's Prestige

On Monday of this week we reviewed EMC's botched attempt at a multi-vendor storage efficiency comparison and yesterday we debunked some lingering misconceptions around provisioning capacity for LUN's on a NetApp SAN.

It was probably not Chuck's intention, but he's actually helped bring incremental attention to NetApp's industry-leading storage efficiency via some interesting disclosures by EMC and Industry Experts along the way.

Time to get back to the movie analogies and wrap-up what we've learned as a result of it all

Tales from the crypt - Sizing and Provisioning a NetApp SAN

Yesterday I promised to conclude my analysis of EMC's (botched) Storage Capacity Utilization Magic Trick with the NetApp Prestige.  Allow me to maintain the suspense a little longer while I indulge a bit more in the Turn, courtesy of some illustrative screenshots.

Some would have you believe configuring 99.99% LUN reservations on a NetApp SAN would result in storage admin's being immediately covered by the umbrella of a mushroom cloud explosion ...

EMC's (botched) Storage Capacity Utilization Magic Trick

One of my favorite movies is The Prestige.  Among the many virtues a movie needs to make it to my "favorites list" is the ability to stay enjoyable after repeated viewings, and perhaps even reveal a bit more each time you see it.  This movie delivers on both counts.

The plot cleverly revolves around the 3 parts or acts of "every great magic trick":

1. The Pledge
2. The Turn
3. The Prestige

Performance as a measure of usable capacity

EMC’s StorageAnarchist took the bait and asked the logical question I was hoping he would when I blogged on the relative complexity of calculating usable capacity on feature rich and resilient enterprise storage arrays. He was at a disadvantage though, because he is operating under the spell of EMC’s competitive FUD which is (sadly for him) far removed from customer reality.

A simple question deserves a simple answer (even if the questioner won't like it)

I do owe the Anarchist thanks though, for picking such nice round numbers to work with, since that will help. To summarize, basically he wanted to know what 100TB raw (200 x 500GB disks) would look like as usable under a true enterprise (OLTP) workload. As a matter of fact, his question has actually been asked and definitively answered for both of us earlier this year.

The answer is at least 62TB usable (conservatively, see better number below) for NetApp and 38TB usable for EMC (as well as most of the rest of the mainstream primary storage vendors).

In January 2008, NetApp published a benchmarked result for a proven OLTP workload agreed upon by most of the enterprise storage industry. This public benchmark result was rigorously and independently audited. As with all highly respected and credible benchmarks, it’s open to peer review by experts from competing vendors in our industry.

So, what's the catch?

Calculating Usable Capacity - Rocket or Nuclear Science?

Marketing claims recognized by independent experts

About a month ago, B&S editor Mary Jander published a blog covering the recent Green Enterprise IT awards, which featured NetApp and 7 other winning vendors.  NetApp was cited for improving primary (gross) usable capacity from 40% (already above the Unix/Windows industry average of 30%) to 60% for our internal production systems which feature all advanced data protection and replication features enabled.  Note that the judges reviewed NetApp's infrastructure for this award before we released our unique FAS deduplication functionality for primary as well as secondary data sets.  Our internal analysis shows deploying FAS deduplication increases NetApp usable capacity numbers even higher.

NetApp was also recognized by the Uptime Institute in that same study for reducing our total number of storage systems from 50 to 10, cutting our number of racks from 25.83 to 5.48, and decreasing direct power consumption by 41,184 kWh per month.

It's not easy being green

However over in the comments section of that B&S blog today, one user seemingly wasn't impressed by the resulting 60% usable capacity number, so I offered up a short explanation (comment #6).  As Paul Harvey likes to say, here's the rest of the story...