When NetApp introduced RAID-DP oh-so-many-years ago, a bunch of folks wondered if it would make sense to release a SAN product that was built directly on-top of RAID-DP.
The concern was that getting NetApp's virtualization layer to perform for SAN workloads would be such a herculean task, that perhaps we could short-circuit our efforts.
After all RAID-DP, offers better reliability and no-compromise performance than RAID mirroring.
In the end, we decided that the path forward was to complete the herculean task ahead of us.
And we did.
And maybe our competition believed their own FUD, that WAFL or NetApp could never perform or scale, so they never bothered to figure out how to make RAID-6 perform in a traditional array.
So here we are.
We offer equivalent performance, more features, and lower cost with better reliability for all of your storage workloads.
So if you have the time to carefully segregate your workloads, and you have the time to deal with the mistakes you will inevitably make, and you have the time to think through every provisioning request, because doing that is fun, maybe you'll find this advice on RAID-6 from StorageZilla to be useful:
- Don't use RAID 6 in random small WRITE intensive situations where you're pushing the metal to the wall.
- For systems using 1TB SATA or other such capacity dense drives RAID 6 is recommended
- For VMware RAID 6 performs great and works fine.
- For Virtual Provisioning RAID 6 performs great and works fine.
If you're a NetApp customer:
For all of your storage workloads, just use RAID-DP.
Spend more time thinking about how to add more value, like what your DR policy should be.
