NetApp - The Missing Shade of Blue

NetApp's $1Million Essay

I don't get paid by the word for what I write, and you probably don't either. Here's a rewarding way to change all that; pick up your pen and in 500 words or so you could be getting the equivalent of $2000 a word.

Yes, it's back; NetApp's $1 million dollar virtualization challenge. (You might remember the original challenge, and what we saw as a need to call out the exceptional advantages of NetApp's guarantee.)

And we're not looking for a Shakespeare.

In no fewer than 500 words, describe your current storage infrastructure and how it supports your VMware environment. Please include as many details as possible to differentiate your submission, such as: number of servers and VMs deployed, type of current storage connected to your virtual servers, your desired business metrics, ROI and timeframe for a new storage deployment in your virtualized environment.

My colleague Vaughn Stewart has made a couple of observations on his latest blog about the program, which is based on our virtualization guarantee. Vaughn makes a point about RAID-10 vs RAID-DP in the guarantee;

As many of you may know, this program has never been without its share of criticism by other storage vendors. In my opinion, I believe this criticism has been fair as a component of the guarantee program compares RAID-10 and RAID-DP on the merits of storage efficiency. While both technologies are near equals in terms of performance and data protection it is unfair to compare the 50% utilization of RAID-10 to the 87.5% provided by RAID-DP

I beg to differ (and did so in my original blog). I believe it's valid to compare the two, because the alternative -- RAID-5 -- just isn't up to the job of protecting your data.

I said back then; so why not compare to RAID-6?  The truth is, we could and would, but we still 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.

And that's the extent of our disagreement. The rest of his blog is spot on; and with public disclosure of the results, I too think we'll see high rates of savings without including RAID-DP.

Get scribbling!

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Du Kommer Att Tala Svenska På VMWorld!

The frequency with which letters are used in the English language has long been know by typographers, who, in the days of mechanical typesetting, kept more E's and Ts to hand than Qs and Ks. Hence ETAOIN SHRDLU; the commonest twelve letters in English ranked by use that covered 80% of the letters used. Letters like Q, Z and V appeared very infrequently indeed.

Until now. Welcome to the changing world of English, where a quick analysis of some text on www.vmworld2009.com suggests that our new lettery overlord is

Normally used 0.98% of the time, VMware has single handedly pushed V way up the scale; There are at least 4 Vs on every page. Some pages have a V in every sentence.

That's more Vs than are used in Swedish.

I'm in San Francisco for VMworld this week, and I hope I'll meet you there. Where, like you, I will try not to sound like I'm speaking Swedish.

Vi ses på VMworld!

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Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

When NetApp came out with Virtualization Guarantee* Program (the 50% version) I was unsurprised at the ferocious chorus of disapproval from EMC, particularly from their bloggers and various EMC pundits on IT news sites. Given that the program is optional -- no one is forcing customers to take it up -- and that Gartner, amongst others, wrote approvingly of the idea, it really didn't concern me that much, and it was to be expected as EMC didn't have one (or even want to offer one). But what has got me and others really worked up was the mischaracterisation of the offer, with some pretty whacky observations about the details.

Next, we announced an updated version of the program based on 35% savings, using other people's storage (including EMC’s) fronted by a NetApp V Series. With this offer, you'd have thought we were dumping toxic waste on your doorstep if your only source of information was an EMC blog.

But now VMware has just announced their 50% savings program. At this point, I'd thought we'd get radio silence from EMC on the subject of our offer. After all, when EMC’s subsidiary (they own 90% of VMware) announces a program that's remarkably similar in nature to a competitor's program, and EMC has just spent the last 3 months dinging a program very like it, you'd probably expect at least a red face or two.

Nope. There's no shame in Hopkinton.  

Peter O'Connor (he's a Big Cheese Down Under with NetApp) is as sick and tired of hearing EMC’s usual line on this, as is everyone else. He’s decided it's time for EMC to put up or shut up.  

And as VP of Sales in ANZ, Peter's got the moolah (a cool $1million of it) to make it happen.  

The offer is to an existing EMC customer in Australia. For up to 50TB of raw storage, including controllers, software, and services for free if they’re willing to migrate their existing VMware environment to NetApp and go public with the results. There are no strings attached to this NetApp offer. Regardless of what the result is, they get to keep the kit.

It’s our response to the EMC Guarantee, listed below.

• It's not fair to compare RAID-DP to RAID-10.
• Nobody uses RAID-10 for VMware. 
• The performance of deduped volumes is bad, bad, bad!
• It's all too hard to get working.
• EMC can do dedup for VMware too! Honest.
• It's only a marketing stunt!
• The VMware guarantee is nothing to do with us.
• blah drone blah-blah drone

We’ve challenged EMC to make the same offer, and go head to head on demonstrating their value in public in a real customer environment and compare their results with ours. Let's see what happens.

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Get Thin, Stay Thin, Run Fast

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.

Storage Tax

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.

Get Thin

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."

Stay Thin

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.”

Run Fast

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.

Storage Tax Reduction

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;

• The Virtualization Effect: NetApp's Virtual Team blog
• Nick Triantos; Storage Nuts & Bolts
• Vaughn Stewart: The Virtual Storage Guy

All worth a read.

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[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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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.

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After the Virtual Fireworks

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.

RAID-10 vs RAID-DP

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.

• Over a period of 5 years, RAID-5 is 4,000 times more likely to suffer from data loss than RAID-DP
• Over a period of 5 years, RAID-10 is 163 times more likely to suffer from data loss than RAID-DP.

To be honest, the question is this – why is your storage vendor not insisting on double disk protection?

RAID-6 vs RAID-DP

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.

No Silver Bullet

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.

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Photo: Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Steven H. Keys and KeysPhotography.com

My thanks to Mike Shea, NetApp, for the text and analysis.

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.

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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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