NetApp - The Virtual Storage Guy

SPEC SFS2008 Verifies You Can Run Faster on Fewer Disks with PAM

NetApp is the only storage vendor focused on reducing storage hardware footprints. Evidently discussions surrounding the use of storage saving technologies in a production environment must be upsetting to the traditional storage array manufactures as anytime I discuss the technologies that enable such environments the comments sections of my posts inevitably end up reading (and smelling) like the zoo after the monkey cage has endured a pooh-flinging outburst.

It is my premise that the attempts of the traditional legacy storage array vendors to dissuade customers from considering and implementing storage savings technologies is a self-severing and not a community driven interest. Maybe my statement is a bit inflammatory but just consider the following statements regarding the use of data deduplication from a well-known traditional storage manufacture VP...

”Typically, when storage admins run into I/O density problems, they have two fundamental approaches: more disks, or faster disks.”

“By spreading the load on more spindles, I/O density can be reduced. However, you now require more storage, power, cooling, etc. -- which kind of tends to defeat the whole premise of data deduplication to begin with.”

“The other approach is to use faster disks -- either disks that spin faster, or perhaps enterprise flash drives. Invariably, these cost more as well -- again tending to defeat the whole premise of attempting to save money through data deduplication.”

Statements like this are clearly meant to caution customers against the use of ‘risky’ new concepts (reduction of storage footprints) and the primary enabling technology (data deduplication). So is the information shared in this warning accurate?

Run Everything Virtualized and Deduplicated : aka Chuck Anti-FUD

Last night I got caught in what I would classify as a tweet-fight with several of my chums over at EMC on the role storage arrays play within a virtual datacenter. The conversation was pretty intense and at one point I posted the following string of tweets…

@sakacc @chuckhollis – Guys EMC & NetApp just look at virtualization differently. Allow me to explain…

@sakacc @chuckhollis - VMware allows customers to share CPU, memory, and network ports among multiple VMs allowing a reduction in servers

@sakacc @chuckhollis - Cisco allows customers to share ports among multiple connection protocols thus reducing network and storage switches

@sakacc @chuckhollis - NetApp allows customers to share disk capacity at a sub VM level among multiple VMs which reduces total storage

@sakacc @chuckhollis - EMC provides shared disk access to multiple VMs. Shared access is not shared resource usage; this is not virtualized

@sakacc @chuckhollis – VMware, Cisco, & NetApp want customers to purchase less hardware. What is EMC’s plan to reduce their HW footprint?

As you can see my premise is clear, for customers to be successful in their virtualization efforts, they must virtualize the entire datacenter this includes servers, networks, and storage.

Who decided that server and network hardware should be reduced while the shared storage footprint is permitted to grow uncontrollably?

The NetApp $1 Million Dollar Virtualization Challenge

Today we announced the $1 million dollar virtualization challenge contest. In this program we are looking for a non-NetApp customer who is willing to migrate their existing VMware infrastructure to a $1 million NetApp solution, if they are willing to publicly share the results of their migration. The winning submission will make out pretty well as they will receive $850K in storage, $100K in support, and $50K in software at no cost.

VCE-101: What's Next with Deduplication?

Welcome to the latest post in our series entitled ‘Virtualization Changes Everything’

In our last post we discussed the CapEx savings provided by data deduplication of both production storage capacity and storage array cache. Deduplication is fundamentally changing the data center and it appears that there’s more on the horizon. I’d like to share with you what I call ‘Data Center Ethernet Acceleration’.

Overview

“"Some call it a software mainframe others call it cloud, it depends on when you were born" – Steve Herrod, CTO, VMware

When discussing multiple applications on a single hardware platform I prefer the term ‘software mainframe’. I think this is due more to my time working with VMware products rather than my age. I still recall my introduction to this concept back in 2001.

VCE-101: Deduplication: Storage Capacity and Array Cache

Welcome to the first session in a series of blog posts entitled ‘Storage 101 - Virtualization Changes Everything’

Data deduplication was originally introduced in Data ONTAP 7.2 in July of 2006 as a technology that enhanced the NetApp Disk-to-Disk (D2D) backup offerings. Coincidentally VMware released VI3 around the same time in June of 2006, and shortly thereafter customers began using these two technologies together to virtualize their servers and storage footprint.

For today’s post we’re going to dive into the realm of storage efficiency and discuss data deduplication and it’s impact in production storage capacity and storage array cache specifically within a virtual data center.

The Format of this Series

As I stated when I decided to kick off these posts I want to share these topics with a wide audience and in order to do so each session will begin with a high level overview of the technology and its value followed by the technical details.

The Highlight of SNW

I spent today assisting in the setup of our booth at SNW in Orlando. This year one of the NetApp demos is a VMware environment running on a Clariion CX array from EMC and a RAMSAN solid-state array from Texas Memory Systems.

Now you may be asking, “Why would NetApp do this?”

We are want to demonstrate our V-Series storage virtualization technology with heterogeneous storage arrays. See we have taken this VMware environment and reduced its storage requirements to just 10% of what was originally required with traditional and leading edge SSD storage arrays.

It’s an awesome statement that times have changed, technology has advanced, and it is time to virtualize your storage arrays. To emphasize these points, may I ask you to recall what your data center used to look like say three to five years ago?

Deduplication Guarantee from NetApp – Fact or Fiction?

I stumbled across these blog posts this morning.

NetApp’s ‘Shining’ Moment – its Capacity Guarantee Program &

NetApp’s ‘Shining’ Moment – its Capacity Guarantee Program follow up

 These blogs attempt to discuss the details of the NetApp 50% Virtualization Guarantee Program. This program is one of the many means by which NetApp is helping customers reduce their storage spenditures and carbon footprint by reducing the amount of storage required to run their virtual infrastructures.

The blog’s author, Jim Haberkorn, made the point that the guarantee program includes a requirement that compares NetApp RAID-DP against traditional storage systems running RAID 10.

I believe the point Jim is trying to make in his posts is, 'RAID-DP requires almost half the physical disks as RAID 10 so one should conclude that the NetApp data deduplication technology works poorly and thus the guarantee program is worthless.'