HP and Death by a Thousand VMs

Over at HP's community storage blog, HP appear to be attempting to psychoanalyze NetApp. Strange, I know, but it seems to be a tactic that keeps them happy. First, HP's Karl Dohm on WAFL; and now Jim Haberkorn on NetApp usable space and our VMware 50% Space Guarantee.

Where to start? Jim's first post and now this latest post are so long and full of hearsay, straw men and misrepresentations that it's a difficult one.

There are many, many questions that Jim asks, and I could make this an exceedingly long reply indeed. Instead, read some of the comments; I've replied (I think!) to most of the substantive points and refuted them, so they're not worth repeating here.

One is worth a mention, though. Here's Jim;

I think you can justifiably conclude that NetApp's usable capacity woes span all sorts of applications.

I could have just said "we don't have a problem" and left it there, but I actually went to some effort last time EMC accused us of this, so I said "we don't have a problem, here's the proof". The response;

NetApp has a huge usable capacity issue in many environments that it tries desperately to hide but at the same time seems driven to confess as if subconsciously trying to purge some unresolved guilt.

Very Freudian. We're apparently in denial. Need more HP evidence of NetApp in denial? Yes, it's our VMware 50% Space Guarantee

Ah, to have one in the first place. Why is this guarantee around at all? Nick Triantos sums up the whys and wherefores. Worth a read, especially to see the impressive numbers of customers and the kind of %age savings they are getting.

Meanwhile, EMC and HP are team tagging at the moment, presumably on the principle that "your a friend of mine if your enemy is my enemy". Cool, really, considering that HP had a hissy fit with EMC on the subject of usable space just recently. How short the memory, how time flies.

Anyhow, EMC and HP have kissed and made up, and they're in agreement. We still have space issues according to the good doctors at HP and EMC, with a bit of a diversionary marketing gimmick thrown in for good measure.

So how does NetApp hide all this?  Well, one way is if they have a small SAN running on the same filer as a large NAS.  With all the free space running around no one really tracks whether the SAN is being a free space hog.   

So we're still a basket case running around when it comes to those space issues, apparently.

Listen, stop playing doctors and nurses and get used to it; it's a good idea. Everyone except HP and EMC thinks it's a good idea. Gartner in a recent report on our guarantee says;

During the research phase of your next storage purchasing cycle, ask each vendor if it offers a capacity savings or utilization guarantee.

Gosh. That's a "No" for EMC and HP then. Go psychoanalyze Gartner, why don't you.

Time for me to don the white coat and stethoscope. Here's a list of psychoses the HP MSA, EVA and XP suffer from;

• RAID-5 which just isn't good enough 
• No evidence of any RAID-6 on the EVA
• HP's VMware best practices that recommend VRAID-1 (mirroring) for performance across all their platforms
• VMware over iSCSI on the EVA is not available without expensive FC/iSCSI bridges
• VMware over NFS is not available on any of the mid to high end storage offerings
• The XP has no VMware certification [Update 5Jan2009; thanks to a sharp eyed reader that pointed out thet the XP is VMWare certified.]  
• None of the systems has displayed any signs of deduplication
• Snapshots impact performance (it's that copy-on-first-write problem again)
• Lack of effective thin provisioning (the EVA's "dynamic provisioning" is actually "chubby provisioning" and anyhow it doesn't work with VMware)

Why do you need these features to remain sane in the VMware world? If there's only one link you click on in this post, make it this next one. Try getting this kind of value on any HP storage system. This is why you'll never ever see a space usage guarantee on VMware from HP on their current range of storage.

An excellent example of low cost operation is captured in this video where we host 5,440 VDI clients in 10 GB of storage and just 32 Volumes.

5,440 VDI clients in 10 GB of NetApp storage. And NetApp has got problems? I think we're fine, thanks.

But not for HP storage. This is death by a thousand VMs. And HP had better not start denying it, or we'll have grounds for thinking they've a guilty secret and got something to hide.

.

Comments

[open systems storage guy]

So here's the rub. If you explain to an IT guy that he can store an unlimited number of VMWare system images on the same few GB by using something like flexclone, he'll be curious. When you explain to him that the technology that allows this has multiple sources of overhead (raid, file system, etc) and that the formattable space he'll see is about 60% of the raw capacity, the objections come quickly.

It's a weird bit of cognitive dissonance, and aside from doing some fancy white-board work, there's no simple and standard way to explain this technology.

[Alex McDonald]

@ossg

My blog doesn't double as a whiteboard. I wish it did. :-) Yes, I get the dissonance. I just wish storage people would look at the average desktop running Windows and ask themselves; how much of the DRAM memory I paid for is available for user data? I'm editing a 100KB Word doc right now. It's taking 1.5GB of overhead to let me edit that 100K.

Same for the super fast CPU which right now only has to keep up with my typing rate. What a waste! But, that's life; there's overhead for functionality everywhere you look.

The point I'll make here is that it's 5000 in 10GB. How much space do you need on an HP or an EMC or anyone elses box? 1000s+ of GB.

Why is that important, gven that 1TB of storage is neither here nor there nowadays?

1. Management and maintenance of the clones, because they are space efficient deduplicated clones. They share the same files and blocks. More on that later.

2. Performance. With a PAM card, lots of these common blocks get cached, and that reduces the access to disk at the back end considerably. Think Monday morning boot storms.

3. Ongoing change. As user desktops get used, ongoing dedupe keeps the user component of the data under control.

4. Efficient replication for DR and VMotion etc. No duplicate blocks flying around over the wire.

5. Cost. Fundamentally, all this means it's cheaper. Cheaper to buy, cheaper to implement (the demo took all of 15 minutes from start to end), cheaper to maintain, cheaper to run.

Thanks for the comment.

[Geert]

OSSG;

I'd take even another parity disk's "overhead" (crappy term for something that brings real value) if it gave me:
- triple disk failure protection
- no performance hit
- no difference in net/raw ratio compared to yesterday's RAID-5

while still providing me 400+% utilization on my VMware intalls because I can simply and transparently -yet reliably, maintaining performance- dedupe my data across my primary and secondary storage (even beyond VMs).

The way you express utilization is soooo 90's.

I think Alex wrote about ELF the other day (http://blogs.netapp.com/shadeofblue/2008/09/elf-wealth-and.html), too bad it didn't stick...

[Cenk Kulacoglu]

Hi Alex,

You mentioned

The XP has no VMware certification

And provided a link to VmWare site, however when I open that page, I can see that the XP product is supported and certified? Even the oldest XP1024 is on that list, along with previous XP10000/XP12000 and the current XP20000/XP24000 products. Can you clarify your point?

Cheers,
Cenk

[Alex McDonald]

@Cenk

My mistake it would appear; apologies, I can't think why I didn't see this when checking out the article. I'll update, and thanks for reading.