HDS / NetApp

[brainslice]

We are in the process of sourcing a new storage vendor for our vSphere and NAS.

Currently under consideration are HDS and NetApp.

Rough specs are:

HDS:

USP-VM

AMS-2500

HNAS 3080 Active/Active cluster.

84x 600GB 15k SAS

102x 2TB SATA

NetApp:

FAS 3160 Active/Active cluster.

96x 600GB 15k SAS

96x 2TB SATA

Does anyone have experience with these two vendors?

Any suggestions as to strong points and / or drawbacks of either?

All comments welcome.

Regards

[AntonVZhbankov]

NetApp has deduplication - this is very strong point for VMware environment.

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MCSA, MCTS Hyper-V, VCP 3/4, VMware vExpert

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[malaysiavm]

Netapp have dedupe on the primary storage, and support multiple protocol out of the box such as FCP, ISCSI, NFS, CIFS and FCOE.

Netapp have something call PAM which can further accelerate the read performance.

HDS definitely is a good box and proven storage solution. They can support virtual LUN function, LUN visible via all storage processors, and others functionality too.

This will be never ending story to compare, and you should look at what is the real requirement in your situation and cost/GB, and future scalability and manageability

Craig

vExpert 2009 & 2010

Malaysia VMware Communities -

[FranckRookie]

Don't forget to integrate the backup in your initial study.

What seduced us is that the Snapshot technology included in NetApp is very fast and well integrated with vSphere. Backups are stored on the disks, so it doesn't need any additional tape drive robot and software (and backup time...).

Regards

Franck

[brainslice]

Thanks to all for the input.

There is much deliberation going on over here now about which direction to take.

Indeed, NetApp has some unique features designed for VMware.

HDS has massive horsepower and scalability.

This is certainly not an apples to apples comparison though. If we were talking strictly about HNAS (BlueArc) vs NetApp, that would be getting closer. However, our proposal from HDS contains the USP-VM platform, which changes things significantly.

Looks like the next week or so is going to be stressful hashing this out with my team.

Cheers.

[malaysiavm]

I think scalability may not be the issue, as Netapp have FAS 6000 series for large scale deployment which allow storage scale out to PetaBytes of storage in single SAN. The latest Dataontap 8 will also support multi storage node cluster.

You should invite both expert from HDS and Netapp to brief you in details before you make and decision on this

Craig

vExpert 2009 & 2010

Malaysia VMware Communities -

[RussellCorey]

I've got more NetApp experience than HDS experience but I have worked with both.

The NetApp is going to be pretty easy for you to manage comparatively speaking and even has a few software products to make managing your storage and snapshots a lot easier. It also leaves you with a built in option to use NFS which can be great when coupled with de-duplication.

The flip side of NetApp can be cluster failback times aren't as fast as they could be and you can't access the same physical disks from more than a signle head at a time (without going through the head interconnect.)

On the HDS, if you do go that route, make sure you allocate enough FE ports to support your ESX servers and anything else that might connect. I see a lot of shops that might use only 2 FE ports on the USP to provide storage to 60+ ESX servers and they run into SCSI reservation issues, difficulties re-scanning, and in some cases SCSI timeouts even though they aren't using more than 50% of the bandwidth of the FE port.

edit:

You may be able to get eval units for both to test with given the scale you're looking to buy at.

[RParker]

NetApp has deduplication - this is very strong point for VMware environment.

Technically this isn't true. Netapp has Single Instance Storage, NOT deduplication. TRUE deduplication takes place at the point where data is being written TO the disk, Netapp doesn't do this. It does it AFTER the fact, so it goes back and finds duplicate files and removes the duplicates.

Why is this important? Performance. There are other SANS that do this much better than Netapp, but Netapp doesn't REALLY have de-duplication.

[RussellCorey]

Who has a product on the market that does inline de-dupe for production/online storage? The only two vendors I know of that offer this feature are EMC and NetApp and both are scheduled processes that run after the fact.

[RParker]

compellent for one, data domain for another.

We had both in house for demo presentation. There is another product too but can't remember their names..

[RussellCorey]

On Compellent, I didn't realize they got their dynamic dedupe out the door yet, last I read they were still working on it. They've really been a storage vendor that I've been keeping an eye on for the last few years but not enough of my customers are using it. I wouldn't be surprised if 3Par was working on something similar themselves.

Data Domain isn't really meant to be run as online storage though; housing active workloads that are reading/writing, etc. On the other hand I have seen people use sis on NetApp to take NFS volumes filled with say webservers 200+ webservers and condense them down to ~70-90GB. Depending on workload you might actually see some increases in performance (more cache hits.)The plus side on NetApp is the 'sis' license is free but you do have to bug sales to give you the key.

Huge caveat with NetApp de-dupe/sis; make sure you properly align your guests or you'll see performance plummet to some very bad places that are likely to make your users start calling you.

[RParker]

some increases in performance (more cache hits.)The plus side on NetApp is the 'sis' license is free but you do have to bug sales to give you the key.

the performance gains are good AFTER sis completes, but during SIS operations you may get hit (that's why it defaults to sun at midnight so it's the least impact usually).

But the dedupe doesn't happen immediately, that's what caught our ear at the compellent meeting, you send data, it's done. Nothing else to do, so the data can 100% concentrate on performance, no after work, and no re work.. (can you say disk fragments?)

Netapp doesn't matter how you configure it, is only average performance. We have a customer right now experiencing the same thing that's how we got wind of compellent in the first place. They are moving off of Netapp (and VM ware for the most part) because of budget and performance.

And they are a huge ESX farm, but they are in the throws of a big Microsoft project.. so they have to move off ESX, but that's another story. Anyway, we want to switch to another SAN vendor, because Netapp just doesn't do it performance wise.. it was OK, but now we are ramping up database performance testing and Netapp is falling behind...