Storage considerations: NetApp FAS 2020

[schobbepezzer]

Hi,

I'm in charge of a medium size vSphere environment and I'm considering to add additional storage space for new projects arriving in Q2.

Some facts:

- 6 Dell-Hosts (4 x PE8650, 2 x R900), members of two HA/DRS-clusters with 320 GB of RAM and 64 Cores, running 185 VMs

- mixed workloads (Oracle Databases, Web- / Applicationservers, 75% unix / 25% windows)

- attached to a EMC CX300-Array w. 6 TB usable capacity via FC (5 RaidGroups w. 5-6 15k fc-hdds using raid-5)

By now, we did not experience any storage-related performance issues, but the Storage Processor Utilization already peaks to 60-70%, so I don't think adding a 3rd enclosure is an option - plus the CX300 is a a bit "outdated"...

As always, we do have a pretty small budget so I had a look at the NetApp FAS2020.

Does anyone have experiences with the FAS2020's performance related to the CX300?

I expect more VMs with oracle database workloads in the future, so I wonder if the smallest NetApp is sufficient.

Thanks for your comments.

Nico

[dnetz]

Can't really comment on FAS2020 performance since we're using them only for secondary site storage (offsite backup and disaster recovery) but if I recall correctly from our talks with Netapp, the 2020 won't be able to run OnTAP 8 which might be useful in the future.

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[schobbepezzer]

Thanks for your input, dnetz.

So, what's your primary storage?

What were your considerations that made the FAS2020 to be "second choice"?

Nico

[dnetz]

Primary storage is FAS2040. I wasn't directly involved in the decision process, but I imagine that the 2020 has a good price/performance ratio and still easy to expand with more disk shelves. We also wanted a secondary storage that could handle running a big enough part of our infrastructure to keep basic services up during a disaster recovery scenario.

Netapp knows how to charge for their more advanced features so it's worth the effort to examine all the technical details before purchase.

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