VMware Space Guarantee Program

Well, here’s a turn up for the books.

A program* that matches the requirements that I blogged on recently. 

“The storage industry need new measures for virtual storage  – and it needs to be able to stand behind what it claims with facts and guarantees, not speculation and vague promises of value for money.”

This far exceeds the vague promises of increased efficiency, more effectiveness and reduced TCO from other vendors. OK, my ELF (Effective Load Factor) doesn’t get a mention, but the…

NetApp 50% Virtualization Guarantee Announcement

…is saying the same thing in different words.

I can do no better than point you at Nick Triantos’ Storage Nuts'n'Bolts and Vaughn Stewart’s Virtual Storage Guy for confirmation of our superior VMware storage capabilities.

And to NetApp’s Space Efficiency Calculator so you can do the sums yourself.

We’ve always known that the value of a NetApp storage system isn’t measured in disks worth or other outdated measures of capacity; that our VMware software is second to none, and that customers are seeing real and measureable benefits from both.

It’s going to be interesting to see the responses to this announcement.

---

Lawyer stuff; small because it’s small print.

*Disclaimer: The guarantee and the related Program is limited to the terms set forth in  www.netapp.com/guarantee, and is applicable only to prospective orders placed after the Program effective date and is dependent upon customer’s compliance with the terms and conditions set forth in this document and any of the instruction sets and specification set forth in the referenced documents. NetApp’s sole and exclusive liability and customer’s sole and exclusive remedy associated with the terms of the guarantee and related Program is the provision by NetApp of the additional storage capacity as set forth in the Program.

.

Comments

[marc farley]

Alex, the link to the guarantee (on this page) isn't working for me (firefox 3.03).

If I can paraphrase: this program says the customer will receive capacity usage benefits at a certain level - and if they don't Netapp will make up the difference to provide the additional expected usable capacity.

Of course there are certain caveats that apply. There always are. Like this one:

"No more than 10% of the following data types under the Program: images and graphics, XML, database data, exchange data, and encrypted data. This also means that large database.
exchange deployments are excluded from this Program. These data types are deduplicated at a lower rate"

[Alex McDonald]

Marc; links corrected, thanks for pointing them out.

It's great having caveats. It comes with the territory. We're here doing something different and positive; where is everyone else?

You don't have caveats because you don't offer the functionality in the first place.

I'll take a slice of caveat over an empty plate any day of the week.

[marc farley]

No empty plate here. Yep, Netapp has more options than 3PAR but we definitely have great capacity utilization and usable capacity or usable to raw yield or whatever you want to call it. (ELF is kind of cute, but its not not going to fly).

I give Netapp credit for coming up with a creative marketing program. It shows creativity, even if it doesn't deliver any direct benefits.

[open systems storage guy]

I love this idea, but I have some qualms about the fine print. You suggest the following baseline for comparison:

"Add on 100% overhead for RAID 10 protection; 2.6% overhead for rightsizing and formatting; and two spare drives."

Who uses raid 10 for VMWare? VMWare is usually sized with raid 5 or 6. You could compare any workload in Netapp raid 4 or DP to a raid 10 and get something like half the disks needed. Raid 10 halves your available space! Even if you were storing nothing but uncompressable images and encrypted data, a raid 10 would take twice the overhead of a raid 4.

If you want to make this mean something, compare it to a raid 5. 32 disks becomes 28 usable minus storage overhead. That's the ratio I've been getting with traditional storage.

[open systems storage guy]

@marc I actually like the ELF idea- not the name, but the idea. It helps compare systems that can address more storage than they can allocate. This of course makes Netapp look good (with cloning, thin provisioning, and dedupe), but to be honest, without something that helps measure the effect of these efficiency technologies, Netapp comes across as a space hog with their 40%-50% overhead.

[marc farley]

@OSS-guy. The ELF idea is good. We need terminology, I don't like the handle "ELF".

[Alex McDonald]

@ossg: For the RAID 10 I defer to Nick Triantos; Chuck Hollis and he are going at it hammer and tongs over here, so no need for me to repeat the argument. But where did you get that 40-50% overhead from? I've exhausted myself and worn out several keyboards banging on about it -- and it's 33%.

@both; Yeah, I hate the ELF name too, but it made the point. So thinking caps on. What would you call it? A prize of my choosing for the name that sticks.

In fact, there's a subject for a blog.