What does exactly HP guarantee?

What does HP offer to their customers on their own dime

What do customers have to lose by signing up for this?

so what are really the requirements?

Dedupe is already deployed by Netapp customers

So is Thin Provisioning

so is RAIDDP

So are Snapshots

Grouping VMs by type in a volume is a Netapp best practice because it does provide a high dedupe ratio

And if you were to look in the comments section of Robin Harri's blog you'd get a good idea as to what people are already getting in terms of the space savings.

Based on the response it looks to me like netApp should be releasing one of these every week.

This program is designed to show NetApp customers how to save 50% of their storage versus comparable competitor configurations that extend similar performance and protection levels by following documented NetApp Best Practices as published in various Technical Reports and the Program requirements.

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williamgeorge

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Erik, thanks for the comment.

The point is that the program sets the bar so low as to be guaranteeing what customers already get from any storage array used for the narrow type of data allowed.   RAIDDP compared to RAID 1, all the space saving tools vs. none, and only virtual machines without the more common data types.  Most any storage array would meet this 50% requirement or very close to it.  There’s nothing unique here.

William, the program does not compare to a competitor’s product.

the 50% GUARANTEE is obviously guided by some rules. There is no company on this planet that provides unlimited guarantee without any rules :)

I have done numerous installations with ASIS, with different results, sometimes about 70% savings, sometimes between 30 - 35%

Hi,

Speaking as someone actually using this technology, I beg to differ with the blogger. I think the offer actually IS pretty substantial and beneficial.

What the blogger appears to be underestimating is the number of like systems (and the degree of similarity between them) that may be virtualised - e.g. in our environment we have ~750 Windows servers, each with a 20GB system volume (on average). The dedupe alone gives us a helluva lot of storage back and the thin provisioning, RAID level (equivalent to RAID 6 I think it is) push this saving even further - I don't really care about this whole 50% guarantee fuss (too late for us anyway!) but do care about my disk utilisation, storage performance, storage resilience and how easy my storage is to manage - and I can tell you that we definitely have all 4 of these. The NetApp tools definitely help and in a big way. I guess this marketing gimmick (sorry, I'm a bit cynical about marketing!) is just a way to alert more people to fact these these tools exist and can really help (its focussed on disk savings, and that's for sure, but also they have a lot of good stuff on on the management side).

As for snapshots, for us the real value is that they provide is non disruptive backups - they offload the backup burden from ESX . We started off using traditional LAN based agents in the VMs but ESX got hammered at backup time (CPU and LAN) so we've now alleviated much of this by moving to snapshots - and they happen to be very storage efficient too - nice side effect :)

These are my observations anyway -  I do hope HP (and others) are putting together competitive systems as what we want is competition in the marketplace without danger of losing out on what we have found to be a highly valuable functionality set.

Best,

Hugo

Hei guys there...nothing to do with raid 5 or raid 6 or raid-dp. Every raid level consumes diff space. NetApp uses the ASIS feature to reduce the blocks consume by VMs. Does HP has similar solution?

Hugo, responding to your request, I don’t want to turn this into a sales pitch, but have you tried out the EVA?  I think you’d be surprised what it delivers regarding utilisation, performance, resilience, and ease of management.  EVA doesn’t always have as many flashy widgets as some competitors.  But it’ll still give you very competitive results.  Karl Dohm has started doing posts on this blog that’ll show you some easy tests you can run to verify that.

Klark, thanks for your comment.  You get it about RAID levels.  A lot will be changing in the category of saving storage space for VM’s soon.  Check out Brian Madden’s blog: www.brianmadden.com/.../a-deeper-look-at-vmware-s-upcoming-quot-view-composer-quot-vdi-disk-image-technology-i-e-multiple-vms-sharing-the-same-disk-image.aspx

There’ll be smaller things shorter term and bigger things longer term.  You should expect a lot of change in those technologies.

What a mis-leading blog post.

We're a SME that implemented a small NetApp SAN last year and we couldn't be happier. It has a host of fantastic features but de-dupe is right at the /top/ of the list. I should add at the outset that we have absolutely nothing to gain by promoting NetApp; we're just a very satisfied customer.

In our environment we're achieving a de-duplication rate of over 70% across all data (a typical mix of VMware, user and app data) - that's more than a tripling of usable space.

The couple of other NetApp customers I know show similar savings using de-dupe, and most (unpromoted) testimonials on the internet demonstrate similar results.

Even if you take into account the disk space lost to the various parity and protection mechanisms NetApp implement, we're still achieving over 50% space saving compared to storing the same data on any other type of storage I can think of.  And all of this is /before/ taking into account the extra 40-odd% space we're saving by using RAID-DP instead of RAID-10.

No comparisons-to-RAID-10 trickery, no but-your-dataset-is-special arguments, just a plain and simple space saving of over 50%, and /on top of that/ another 40-odd% saving from using RAID-DP over RAID-10.

Hi Matt -

You had left this comment on another post that Jim Haberkorn replied to.  Here's what Jim said that I'll repost here for all to see.  Thanks again... Calvin

Hi Matt,

Thanks for your comments. First: I would like to know what you found misleading about this blog in regards to the NetApp capacity guarantee program. Was I wrong about all the caveats? Was my RAID-comparison math wrong? If I am in error about something, I would be pleased to correct it.  I think, though, if I had made a mistake, a NetApp employee would have jumped in and pointed it out by now. But, in any case, please let me know.

Second, as an aside: the argument you use below in justifying and accepting the ~20% lost space because "it is aimed at protecting your data” is not the first time I’ve heard that argument. I heard it the first time from a NetApp storage architect who is now working for HP, and who was relating to me how some NetApp sales reps tried to explain away their usable capacity problems. When you think about it, though, isn’t that argument a little strange. The NetApp space reservation policies are indeed there for a very necessary purpose, and though NetApp will refer to them as ‘best practices’ they are much more serious than that. They are necessary to compensate for a flaw in the NetApp technology – a flaw no other array has, and one that could result in the loss of data. So, in a sense, it is a tax on the customer, for a design flaw that NetApp cannot remove from their operating system.  

At no place in my blog will you ever catch me saying that every NetApp customer is unhappy or that every NetApp customer sees every NetApp problem. What I do say is that with the NetApp technology there is a very complicated relationship between capacity, performance, and time, and that NetApp customers rarely know ahead of time if, when, and how this complicated balancing act will hit them. If you are one of the lucky ones that is doing well, then I am happy for you. If that should change for you at any time in the future, then we would consider it a privilege if you would consider HP for your next storage purchase.  

Best regards,

Jim