VTL Deduplication, NetApp Style

I believe that architectural style is a natural outgrowth of your organizational DNA.

If you spend all of your time thinking about how to modify a software system, then you tend to modify the software system.

If you spend all of your time building different hardware platforms, then you tend to build lots of hardware systems.

And this fundamental philosophical approach to system design is reflected in how you think about systems. For example, for a NetApp engineer the notion that a unified storage platform is a combination of a set of distinct hardware pieces running different software is an odd statement. For EMC, apparently, the combination of different hardware systems into an aggregate hardware system is unified storage. And I guess from their point of view, namely that there is a single aggregate hardware device that can do everything, they are right.

And I've explained why the two approaches offer fundamentally different value propositions.

Why bring this up, again?

Because the NetApp VTL team announced the availability of deduplication on our VTL systems.

And because, the NetApp VTL team has our engineering DNA in them rather than apply bolted-on technology, like EMC, they integrated deduplication into the core system design.

The net effect is that the VTL team can deliver a simpler system, a more reliable system and I believe, ultimately, a faster system. The system is simpler because it has fewer moving parts. More reliable because it does not have multiple hardware components that can fail. And a faster system because integrating deduplication with the code that manages the disk ultimately can give you faster performance because you don't have multiple layers of software mucking with the disk layout.

I believe those attributes of simplicity and reliability and speed have real value to customers. 

So I am very excited with this most recent announcement, not only because we address a key customer demand, but also because of the way we did it.

Comments

[nda]

clearly you have never used one of the vtl's in production before..

:\

[John]

Why WAFL is at the core of unified storage - or maybe not :-)

http://blogs.netapp.com/extensible_netapp/2008/10/why-wafl-is-at.html

[kostadis roussos]

nda-

there are two points of view about simplicity.

- the current point-of-time

- the long term view

and I was taking the long-term view, that the architectural approach can provide simplicity.

And I gotta believe that regardless of our complexity one architecture and software stack is simpler than EMC's multiple hardware and software stacks.

kostadis

[kostadis roussos]

John,

WAFL is at the core of our unified storage.

However, it's also fair to observe that VTL and FAS are not unified storage devices.

Having said that, VTL has some of the aspects of a unified storage architecture, especially around the hardware.

cheers,
kostadis