I don't have an iPhone, but if there's one app that would make me buy one, it's this NetApp space calculator. So cool! It's not yet publically available, and hopefully whatever Ironbrick and NetApp need to agree to get it out and available gets agreed soon. Good work Rajeev!
I was part of a webex yesterday to a number of NetApp partners about VMware, and how we add value to the business of virtualization. Presenting along with me was Mike Shea, who made me aware of something he calls the Storage Tax. I hadn't thought of it this way before.
Mike's take on this is pretty straightforward. Virtualization of servers and applications is meant to bring savings; significant ones. Is it unreasonable to expect savings of 15 to 1 or even higher? Perhaps, perhaps not. Let's agree on a lower figure; 10 to 1. In fact, the figure doesn't really matter, because this is all about fractions, so make your target what you wish.
Here's the list of taxes you pay when you start down this path.
First, the shared storage tax. You need a shared storage system, SAN or NAS. They are (unfortunately!) not free. You loose part of your savings.
Second, the backup and recovery tax. Actually, more the recovery tax; backups are precious, restores are priceless in a VM environment. There's a new cost you didn't have before.
Third, more staff. You might have made your infastructure virtual, and shrunk the physical. There extra virtual objects need managing; VM savvy staff that manage more LUNs, more VMDKs, more objects you didn't have before. You can't make your staff virtual (yet!).
Fourth, tiered licensing all round for the software, from the VMs to the storage.
You can probably think of more storage taxes, and by the time you've finished adding them all up, a 2 to 1 saving might seem reasonable. That is, as long as you haven't told your finance people that you'll save them wodges of wonga, and all you come back with is a few small handfuls of lose change. It's a long way from the 10 to 1 you promised them.
That's where NetApp comes in. We can get back some of those taxes, and here I'll discuss just a few of the technologies that can help push the ratios back up towards your original goal, and point at people who really know this stuff back to front.
Going the VM route is about thinning out your servers, and getting better utilization of what's left. Getting thin with your storage is equally important. NetApp makes this easy; because the storage pool is virtualized in a NetApp SAN or NAS system, we can clone very thin copies of object like VMware images. We have a blog that focuses on virtualization (bookmark it now!) and a recent post had this;
"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."
OK, so we've driven down the storage tax of commissioning of new VMs. To stay thin is another trick we can employ, and for that, NetApp offers deduplication. Simply put, having shed those ugly pounds of storage fat in the first place, keeping those pounds off becomes essential, otherwise the storage tax just balloons out of control.
How thin can we keep it? YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary), but here's another virtualisation blog (bookmark it now!) where customers regularly get 50 to 80% savings through deduplication.
“NetApp has saved us a lot on storage for VMware. When we originally set up VMware [at Duke Institute for Genome Sciences] , I allocated about 2.4TB for it. With NetApp deduplication, I’ve been able to shorten that down to less than 700GB. We now see an average of 83% reductions in redundant data on our VMware system.”
One other advantage to a NetApp system is being able to perform well, even with 1000s of VDI images. Deduplication not only reduces the space footprint, but allows performance improvements by keeping deduplicated data in a lookaside cache. Another of NetApp's bloggers (bookmark this one too!) discusses NetApp's PAM technology and how it relates to VMware;
Today, we've released yet another VMware related Technical Report (TR-3705) titled "NetApp and VMware VDI Best Practices" that addresses capacity and performance requirements, sizing techniques, system configuration validations, VDI boot storms, Login storms and the potential effect on storage as well as the role of the Performance Acceleration Module (PAM) as a secondary cache in VDI environments.
NetApp provides more -- a lot more -- to reduce the storage tax and get back towards those 10 to 1 savings. And I'm grateful to Mike Shea for making it so simple to understand!
Some of those links again;
[For my 7 regular readers, apologies for the long gap between this post and the last. It's been hectic here at ShadeOfBlue Towers.]
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I spend too much time worrying. Far too much. I get concerned that our competitors are going to find out our Big Secret. A colleague has asked me to respond to a competitive analysis of NetApp's deduplication, and I can't get past this paragraph. The stress is killing me.
"So, we ask again, why is NetApp the only vendor to provide dedupe on the primary volume. Answer: because they have to."
NetApp provide leading edge technology solutions, a list so long I won't post it here; for that, our corporate website does a great job. But I still worry.
NetApp has tens of thousands of customers using these technologies to their considerable advantage, including deduplication. That's from measured data we collect from customer systems (using AutoSupport). And yet I still worry.
NetApp has a Virtualization Space Guarantee program, now extended to include other virtualization products including Microsoft's Hyper-V and Citrix' XENServer.
Ulcers. The fear is gnawing away at me. The Big Secret, our dirty laundry. I can't take the stress of this, so it's time to confess.
...it [NetApp] tries desperately to hide but at the same time seems driven to confess as if subconsciously trying to purge some unresolved guilt.
This isn't my usual shrink speaking. This is an HP competitive storage analyst I'm quoting, but he's good, no? He's so right, that's where the stress is coming from; hiding the Big Secret.
It's time to come clean. I confess. We only provide deduplication on primary volumes because we have to.
Confession made, the guilt is gone. What a relief! I feel better already.
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I’ve been blogging on storage efficiency for a while now, and it’s pretty apparent that NetApp have a great range of technologies for getting more out of a storage purchase than just about anyone else.
But what about existing customers? How do they get to make the pips squeak?
Chuck Hollis makes the good point that you really can’t just depend on providing better stuff for only new customers in the current economic climate. There’s a need to reach out to your existing customers and make sure they’re getting the best value from their storage, regardless of when they bought it.
NetApp has been doing this for a long time with our Storage Availability Audit (SAA). It’s built on the AutoSupport data that we collect from every system on support.
Performed quarterly (premium support) and semi-annually (standard support), this regular health audit offers a review of installed NetApp equipment and is followed by delivering the report to the customer.
It’s a pretty holistic process (no pun intended Chuck), covering a wide range of storage management practices. A sample of a small part of this in-depth report is shown below.
An executive summary with recommendations for action based on NetApp best practice informationIf you’re an existing customer, you can get the best out of this and other AutoSupport services through the NOW website. Start squeezing.
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When I blogged recently on NetApp 50% Virtualization Guarantee Announcement I suggested that
It’s going to be interesting to see the responses to this announcement.
It was. There was considerable reaction. One blogger (not a vendor, but a user) likened it to lighting the blue touchpaper and watching the fireworks.
And one big point in many people’s minds is why we chose to make our comparison to RAID-10, rather than RAID-5, or why we chose not to make a comparison with RAID-6.
Those are good questions, and they deserve an answer.
NetApp understands that the bulk of disk deployments has been RAID-5 for a while. The driving force behind the adoption has been cost reductions – RAID-10 is often just too expensive and most applications simply do not need or use the performance increases it gives over RAID-5.
However, performance is not reason we insist upon RAID-10 as the comparison disk configuration – it’s data protection.
RAID-5 simply does not measure up to today’s realities. We are looking to compare based upon what is actually required today, and not yesterday’s best practices. We believe that vendors promoting single disk parity schemes are not looking after their customer’s best interests, and this is at the heart of matter.
Today, many people are driving to lower costs further – and the turmoil in the economy is going to greatly accelerate this activity. Companies are looking at SATA drives and large format FCP and SAS as part of the answer to lowering the costs of their storage infrastructure.
But as drive formats get larger, the likelihood of suffering data loss and an outage due to double disk failure or block read errors during a rebuild are much more real.
If you have a look at the math in this IBM Best Practices for Exchange technical paper, it gets pretty obvious that RAID-5 is a new recipe for disaster and storage vendors need to provide much better guidance for their customers.
To be honest, the question is this – why is your storage vendor not insisting on double disk protection?
So why not compare to RAID-6? The truth is, we could and would, but we don’t find our competition selling it. It’s there on the spec sheet as a solution from some vendors – not all have the capability -- but it’s rarely put forward as a viable solution.
[Update 10 Oct: StorageZilla now reckons RAID-6 is ready for the prime time, and StorageBod (a user who comments below) also reckons EMC promote RAID-6 actively. I asked several colleagues whether they ever see EMC propose RAID-6 when they’re competing, and the answer was a resounding no.. Unscientific I know, but I’ll stick by my contention that there’s not much EMC RAID-6 out there in comparison with RAID-5 or 10.]
Most, if not all, competitive RAID-6 implementations significantly reduce capacity and performance for increased data protection. That reduced capacity and performance is something that NetApp systems with RAID-DP don’t suffer from.
[Update 10 Oct: And I’m sticking by this one too. Again, see the comments.]
Our space guarantee for VMware makes that commitment for capacity. And our performance benchmarks, both SpecSFS for NAS and SPC for SAN, are all done with RAID-DP.
But the RAID implementation is just part of the solution. There is no one silver bullet, and no matter how good any one piece of the solution is, for best results, our customers need to implement them all as explained in the program details.
This program is not simply about RAID, but storage efficiencies and the multiple technologies we bring to bear on the problem of providing superior capacity utilization while protecting data.
To quote my colleague Nick Triantos;
Once customers see the other advantages we have, in terms of performance efficient snapshots, rapid and efficient cloning and provisioning techniques, rapid data backup and recovery, and un-compromised data protection, they will realize a whole new way to manage their storage in a VMware environment.
Photo: Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Steven H. Keys and KeysPhotography.com
My thanks to Mike Shea, NetApp, for the text and analysis.
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…
…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.
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