NetApp - The Virtual Storage Guy

VCE-101 Thin Provisioning Part 2 – Going Beyond

This is the second installment of a two-part post focusing on the thin provisioning capabilities native to vSphere. If you haven’t read Part I - The Basics, I’d suggest you do so before proceeding. We've covered a lot of content which you really should have a solid grasp of before proceeding.

In part I, I covered the basics of thin provisioning and how it operates with any storage platform. In part II we are going to expand upon a number of the points introduced in part I with a focus on how the storage virtualization functionality in Data ONTAP enhances VMware's thin provisioning and the over arching goal to reduce both the CapEX and OpEx associated with storage in the virtualization space.

Anatomy of a Virtual Disk

Let’s begin where we started in part I, by reviewing different disk formats. This time let’s consider them with the virtual disks operating at 70% storage capacity.

- The Thick Virtual Disk

Again this is the traditional virtual disk format which we all know rather well. From this image you will notice do not receive any storage savings in the datastore, yet we do receive 30% savings on the storage array.

If you're asking, "how can a thick VMDK consume less storage on the array?"
You'll need to go back and read Part I

- The Thin Virtual Disk

In this image we have the thin provisioned virtual disk and as you can see we are receiving a 30% storage savings in both the datastore and on the array.

- The Eager Zeroed Thick Virtual Disk

In this last image we have an eager zeroed thick virtual disk which provides us no savings at either the datastore or on the array.

VCE-101 Thin Provisioning Part 1 – The Basics

This week’s VMware Communities Roundtable featured one of my favorite people at VMware, Paul Manning who spoke on thin provisioning. This topic is the inspiration for today’s VCE post. Reducing storage costs is top of mind and it's gonna take some time covering thin provisioning so let’s begin!

Virtualizing a Datacenter

I am not exaggerating when I share with you that every customer I meet with has elaborate plans to virtualize most, if not all, of the Intel based servers within their data center, yet deploying this new architecture is challenged to move from a portion to a majority of the footprint due to storage costs (both CapEx and OpEx). I'd like to summarize the message from these meetings for you, which goes something like this…

“We love server virtualization! With VMware we’ve reduced our server footprint and are targeting more systems to virtualize.”

“We love converged Ethernet! With Cisco we’ve reduced our port counts and are targeting to have a single platform for voice, data, and user access.”

“Storage costs are out of control, can you help? Prior to virtualization we roughly ran 20%-30% of our servers on shared storage arrays. Virtualization is forcing every VM onto shared storage. What do we do?”

VCE-101: Oracle On VMware Without Limits

After a brief hiatus I am very eager to return to the ‘Virtualization Changes Everything’ series, and today’s post is an impromptu addition to our syllabus. Recently fellow VMware vExpert Steve Kaplan of INX published a rather thought provoking post rallying for the acceleration of the transformation to a 100% virtualized datacenter. Steve waxes poetic advocating acquisition decisions spanning compute, storage and network should be driven by their contribution to data center virtualization success and I would encourage everyone to read it.

In today’s post I’d like to highlight and expand upon the following comment in Steve’s post:

‘Creativity overcomes most obstacles to a fully virtualized data center such as the minority of software manufacturers still refusing to support their applications on VMs. An easy resolution for organizations running vSphere over NFS on NetApp is to FlexClone a Virtual Machine's virtual disk into a LUN and simply present to a physical server. Voila, instantaneous V2P.’

Demos from the HP TechDay 2009 Follow-Up are Live!

My apologies to all for the delay, our original intentions to get the audio and video from the October 6th event were met with multiple challenges ranging from having a high quality video recording without audio, to a crystal clear audio recording containing an audio duplex issue, and being unaware of the YouTube 10 minute limit on the length of videos.

Luckily for us WebEx saved the day by providing an audio and video source, which while not the sharpest, did allow us to share our live (without a net) demonstrations with the storage community.

NetApp Insight Conference 2009

My apologies to all, I had a number of blog related commitments get pushed out due to a scheduling snafu on part. I am happy to announce that I have completed my preparations for NetApp’s Insight 2009 and I now I can address a number of items requiring my attention including a number of unpublished posts!

Insight is our annual conference for storage engineers, architects, and consultants. It allows attendees to network, get up to speed with the latest in advanced storage technologies and integrations, and of course to catch a sneak peak at our future capabilities.

This years events will be held in Phoenix, Arizona and Athens, Greece during the first and third weeks of November respectively.

Members of the NetApp vTME team and I will be presenting a number of the 90+ breakout sessions. As expected our content will dig into the details of virtualization integration technologies and will showcase joint solutions with our platinum sponsors Cisco and VMware.

A Follow-up on HP TechDay 2009 with an Invitation for You!

This week HP demonstrated several of their technology offerings to the storage community, and as a part of this event HP provided a hands on lab where attendees to 'kick the tires' of their storage technology offerings. As a part for this lab attendees were able to complete the same tasks with storage arrays and management tools from EMC and NetApp.

These types of educational experiences can really benefit the community by showcasing one’s enhancements and differentiation. I fully endorse these types of labs, sharing information empowers the user community and raises the bar in terms of what we must develop in order to remain an industry leader… except this isn’t what happened.

According to multiple tweets attendees were stating that tests designed to demonstrate storage integration with Windows systems and VMware were the command line interface and Filerview. This caught my attention as these aren't the tools NetApp recommends for our install base. A quick glance at a few of the sites covering the event confirmed the use of these legacy tools.

In fairness I need to highlight that HP did follow the steps provided in our storage best practices documents for VMware TR-3428 (VI3) and TR-3749 (vSphere). I would like to share with you that we are in the process of updating these documents with a goal of reducing their sizes by approximately 40%.

We hear the VMware community loud and clear - simplicity equates to scaling an environment.

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?

VMware Communities Roundtable Presents a Multivendor iSCSI Podcast

I am very pleased to share with you that on September 30th, you can join Andy Banta (VMware), Adam Carter (HP/Lefthand Networks), Eric Schott (Dell/EqualLogic), Chad Sakac (EMC), yours truly on the VMware Communities Roundtable Episode number 66 where we will be discussing our recent joint iSCSI blog post.

John Troyer has dubbed this episode ‘iSCSI Super Friends with EMC, NetApp, Dell, HP, & VMware’

VMworld 2009 – Thoughts from the show

It’s been two weeks since VMworld 2009 concluded. I believe the show was an overwhelming success for VMware and their ecosystem partners. I believe this year’s event demonstrated that VMware was executing on their strategy to be the leader in the virtualization of the data center through the refinement of numerous technologies, enhancements, and partnerships.

As there has been a ton of coverage on the show, the sessions, the product and partnership announcements, etc… I thought I’d go in a different direction with today’s post and share a theme that was top of mind in nearly every discussion I had with attendees whether they were customers, prospects, partners, analysts, administrators, or executives.

Virtual data centers today are faced with large challenges when it comes to managing their storage.

What seems common in most environments is most of the VMware administrative teams are staffed with individuals who have modest experience with storage architectures and administration. This model has resulted in very successful server virtualization architectures based on unmanageable, hard to troubleshoot, and extremely expensive storage platforms.

One customer labeled their situation as one of “Ever Multiplying Complexity”

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.

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.

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.

Everything Old is New Again

I’ve been saying ‘everything which is old is new again’ over the past few years as it is very evident within the server virtualization landscape. Well low and behold Google announces plans to develop their browser, Google Chrome, into its own operating system and I believe the same phrase applies.

I vividly recall my second job in the IT industry, when I was at a regional Internet Service Provider. 'Back in those days' the big news were the plans of Netscape to release a Java based operating system delivered via Netscape Navigator.

I’m a huge fan of Google and I hope they can pull this off. I wonder how much of what was learned in developing Android will be leveraged in the new OS.

You know what would really impress me? What if Google got into the server virtualization business – now that would be cool! Hey they're already in the cloud...

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.

Has the World Gone Mad?

This may be the question you are asking around the water cooler this morning if you are a server virtualization vendor or the manufacture of legacy storage arrays.

In the past week VMware & NetApp have raised the stakes in the competitive landscape. In this post I'd like to share with you these announcements. It appears both companies are very serious about accelerating the adoption of virtualization technologies within customers’ datacenters.

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.'

Welcome...

We all have friends, family, and coworkers who operate on different social timelines. Some of them arrive to an event early, others right on time, and a few consistently arrive ‘fashionably late’ (like it’s ingrained within their DNA).  I guess I fall into this later category, as today is the first day of the rest of my life in the blogosphere.