NetApp - The Virtual Storage Guy

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?

A “Multivendor Post” on using iSCSI with VMware vSphere

One of the most popular posts we’ve ever done was the original ‘Multivendor Post’ to help our mutual iSCSI customers using VMware that focused on the operation of the software iSCSI initiator in ESX 3.5 with several iSCSI targets from multiple vendors. There’s been a lot of demand for a follow-up, so without further ado, here’s a multivendor collaborative effort on an update, which leverages extensively content from VMworld 2009 sessions TA2467 and TA3264. The post was authored by the following vendors and people: VMware (Andy Banta), EMC (Chad Sakac), Dell/EqualLogic (Eric Schott), HP/Lefthand Networks (Adam Carter), and NetApp.

One important note – in this post (and going forward we’ll be trying to do this consistently) all commands, configurations and features noted apply to vSphere ESX and ESXi equally. Command line formats are those used in when using the VMware vMA, which can be used with both ESX and ESXi. Alternate command line variants are possible when using the remote CLI or service console, but we’re standardizing on the vMA.

This post covers a broad spectrum of topics surrounding the main point (changes in, and configuration of the iSCSI software initiator in vSphere ESX/ESXi 4) including:

• Multipathing using NMP and the Pluggable Storage Architecture

• vmknic/vSwitch setup

• Subnet configuration

• Jumbo Frames

• Delayed Ack

• Other configuration recommendations

If this sounds interesting – or you’re a customer using (or one considering using) iSCSI and vSphere 4 read on!

Attention CEOs: Pay $75 per Virtual Desktop for Storage

Recently both NetApp and EMC published VDI whitepapers with our mutual partners VMware and Cisco. Both papers are very solid and should result in robust infrastructures; however, the solutions are far from equal and I’d like to take 5 minutes of your time to share with you some interesting points of comparison.

Sure the EMC paper focuses on UCS platform while the NetApp paper focuses on a Nexus infrastrucutre, but that’s not what I want to discuss. Yes, the EMC architecture running on Fibre Channel over Ethernet and the NetApp solution is leveraging NFS, but that’s not what I’d like you to consider either.

The level of differentiation I want to highlight is the cost per desktop in both of these solutions. Why cost? Simple, it is the number one hindrance to virtual desktop adoption.

EMC: The Storage Most Integrated with VMware? – The Conclusion

We here at NetApp have been burning the proverbial midnight oil getting ready for VMworld, and in doing so I have put off posting a number of blog entries.

I trust you will be very impressed with our VMworld line up. If you can’t make the show make sure to hit our Virtualization YouTube Channel, as all demos will be posted there when the show opens.

A week and a half ago I posted the first half of a discussion that started with some recent customer meetings and the claims by a storage vendor that they were the most integrated storage with VMware. This post received a fair amount of discussion and comments for which I am grateful. You may note I closed that original post asking for feedback and fact checking of the data shared.

VMworld 2009 – Storage Integration Sneak Peek

I trust you are as excited as I am with VMworld just around the corner. In case you missed it, we have a lot going on in San Francisco. Brian Gracely has a published number of posts covering the details of our Breakout Sessions and the sessions featuring either NetApp Partners or Customers over at the Virtualization Effect.

For more details click here, here, and here.

If you’d like some insight as to Dave’s plans to present during our Keynote presentation check out this post in the NetApp Communities.

The Storage Most Integrated with VMware

In yesterday’s post I made an effort to clarify the level of integration between VMware and a storage vendor claiming to have the greatest level of integration. While I craft the follow up to that post I’d like to offer you a preview of one of the integration technologies that will be made available and on display at VMworld.

EMC: The Storage Most Integrated with VMware?

My apologies for being away from the blog for a bit. I’ve been heads down either meeting with customers or working with my team as we wrap up the final details for our VMworld presentations and demos. Today I’d like to share a true story from these recent customer visits. In a number of these meetings, multiple customers shared a similar story of their EMC sales teams stating that EMC was the storage most integrated with VMware.

I guess if I didn’t work in the storage industry, I’d suspect this claim would seem very plausible. Why wouldn’t it be true? EMC is parent company of VMware and as such they probably have tighter engineering relationship that result in solutions exclusive to EMC… Right?

A Customer's Findings: VMware on NetApp vs EMC

It must be ‘Brief Post Friday’ as I keep getting pinged with great info to share all the while I have several other deadlines to meet (I guess its another evening of working until midnight).

I have the privilege of sharing with you the following report compiled by a rather large customer which compares the results of virtualization consulting engagements completed by EMC and NetApp.

The Epiphany - I Had One, You Want One?

Recently I was visiting customers and prospects in the North East and during one of our meetings the customer stated, “…what NetApp is doing, in terms of storage virtualization, make us feel like NetApp is much more aligned with the goals of VMware than their parent company…”

This praise was shared while the customer told us how EMC is working to earn back their VMware (storage) business. Apparently the EMC team stating something to the effect that more companies run VMware on EMC than on any other storage platform and that the numbers from these surveys validated this claim.

The customer shared with us that what was very interesting in this data set was that NetApp's gains in market share was much more impressive than EMC's legacy market share.

A “Multivendor Post” to help our mutual NFS customers using VMware

We were quite a bit surprised to see how popular our “Multivendor iSCSI” post was. The feedback was overwhelming and very supportive of industry leaders partnering to ensure customer’s success with VMware. While writing that post, we (Vaughn Stewart from NetApp and Chad Sakac from EMC) discussed following up the iSCSI post with one focused on deploying VMware over NFS. The most difficult part around creating this post is that we couldn’t do it with our iSCSI-focused colleagues.

Since the original post, we’ve been busy assisting our customers and partners. We apologize for the delay, so without further ado we present to you the followup: a “Multivendor NFS” post for our joint customers. One of the goals of this post is to dispel the FUD customers often hear around NFS. Heck, if EMC and NetApp can agree – then you KNOW this post is FUD-Free!