Around the Storage Block Blog : virtualization, NetApp

What will EVA customers benefit from new NetApp program be? Zip! Zilch

CalvinZ — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:51:00 GMT

In my last post, I included a couple of summary videos from our recent HP StorageWorks Tech Day. The hands-on lab really stirred up a few folks over at NetApp. The week after our Tech Day, they did a WebEx session to try to address some of the comments made by the bloggers about how difficult the management of their FAS system was. I won't go into details about that but I counted at least three different GUIs that they showed during that demo. The HP StorageWorks EVA has one - Command View. But, that's not the topic I want to cover today.

The old "switch-a-roonie"

During their online demo, Vaughn Stewart from NetApp also discussed the NetApp vSeries - a network based storage virtualization product - and suggested that HP and NetApp were partnering to help EVA customers. Vaughn thanked me for attending the demo and talked about partnering with HP. I thought he was trying to connect the fact that I attended as being an HP endorsement of the vSeries. It wasn't. I made it very clear that HP wasn't working with NetApp to put vSeries products in front of our EVA's. I told the demo audience that HP has our own network-based SAN virtualization product called the SAN Virtualization Services Platform (SVSP) that competes with the vSeries and in no way do we recommend EVA customers use the vSeries to virtualize a pool of EVAs. We have talked about the SVSP several times on this blog and it will be discussed in a podcast later this week.

I initially didn't understand why Vaughn brought the vSeries into the demo. But a week or two after the NetApp demo, they announced a new marketing program targeting EMC CX series and HP EVA installed base customers with their vSeries. Now it's pretty clear to me what was going on then. This new NetApp marketing program asks customers to consider putting a vSeries in front of an EVA or CX.

So I want to spend a few minutes now discussing why I think it would be a bad decision for any EVA customer to consider such a thing. It's my belief that the benefits to an EVA customer would be zip (and interestingly that is the name of NetApp's program).

Improve storage efficiency at what price?

The claim NetApp is making is that EVA customers are not efficiently using their storage capacity. That's a bit laughable given that with an EVA, every spindle is used for data and unless using tiering, we recommend a single disk group which gives incredible storage capacity efficiency. To be in the program, NetApp has to approve the customers' application. The customer is basically signing up to purchase the vSeries in 90 days if it delivers what NetApp will stipulate. Be sure NetApp also stipulates the peformance hit you'll take - but I'm ahead of myself on that one.

My guess is the number of customers that actually get into the program will be rather small and maybe that's a NetApp objective of their marketing program. I suspect that NetApp's real motive is to develop a list of CX and EVA customers that they can continue to call on.

The NetApp claims of improved storage efficiency will come from a couple of categories of services that the vSeries provides for the arrays attached to it.

Thin provisioning
Data replication (snapshot, clones, etc)
Deduplication

The EVA customer already enjoys capacity efficiencies with the first two categories of thin provisioning and data replication. (Note that the EVA doesn't use traditional thin provisioning today but uses a product called Dynamic Capacity Manager that accomplishes similar results by integrating with the OS).

For that matter, if customers wanted to pool their capacity of multiple EVAs and manage it as one pool, the SVSP offers thin provisioning and replication services too. What we don't offer today is primary LUN deduplication. But should customers running an EVA rush to deduplication their block-based mission critical storage? I think the answer is absolutely not and here's a few things to consider:

NetApp has recently claimed 37,000 deployments of deduplication (via their PR department) but in a recent earnings call, their executives said 37,000 downloads. I don't know about you but there's a big difference between the number of customers who download some free software versus who are actually using it, especially in production environments.
There's a trade-off to implementing deduplication with primary, block based storage - and that trade-off is performance. Data that I've seen from a few different sources has said that a top customer concern in a virtualized environment is performance. I've seen throughput testing results that say the performance degradation on a FAS system with dedup can be as high as 65%. Their own recommendations say to run it during low activity and not all of the time. NetApp also makes you sign a waiver stating you understand the risks of lower performance.
We haven't tested to see what the actual deduplication capacity savings would be and frankly there are a lot of factors that would play into that. Since the controllers in the vSeries are the same controllers in the FAS system, it's worth noting that we have found that the percentage of capacity savings is roughly equal to the percent of slowdown.
And that performance hit from deduplication doesn't include any other latencies that the vSeries introduces because of their in-line architecture.

So should an EVA customer put their arrays behind a NetApp vSeries for a potential small capacity savings when the potential performance penalty is high? And keep in mind the vSeries is based on the FAS controller. We've shown in a recent blog post that based on our testing, the performance of that degrades rapidly.

There are some good reasons to implement SAN-based virtualization with a product like the StorageWorks SVSP or the NetApp vSeries. However, for an EVA customer, NetApp's value proposition of getting better capacity efficiency of the physical storage just isn't one of them. A far better answer for the EVA customer is the StorageWorks SVSP. We'll cover this topic in podcast later this week so stay tuned for that.

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HP LeftHand capacity

CalvinZ — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:37:00 GMT

By Jasen Baker, Storage Architect

I once heard that in communicating your opinion or differences, you should not use personal phrases, such as "you always", "you never", "every time", etc. These make broad, sweeping assumptions which seldom reflect the truth, especially when communicating differences in products. Attention to detail, such as quoting someone's name when providing a source of argument, or consolidating many options into a single unified calculation over simplify and often times mislead readers who are looking for educated facts instead of uninformed guesses.

As an example, take a look at online value calculators. There are calculators for mortgages, calculators for the national debt, ROI calculators, and even storage capacity calculators. They do their best to point you in a certain direction, to narrow down the scope of what you will be working with, but don't truly take in all the factors, hence why the infamous asterisk * exists!

In responding to a recent blog post referencing "LeftHand Capacity Calculator" crafted to demonstrate useable percentages of available capacity, it's supposed to ALWAYS, come out this way.

To quote the blog, "That's because, regardless of how small or how large your LHN SAN, it's always:"

Image "courtesy" of NetApp

There's that word again, always.

In storage, there are useable capacities that always occur. That always, is the space you lose as a result of hardware RAID, well, unless it's hardware RAID 0.

First, the HP LeftHand storage nodes can be configured in RAID 5, 6, or RAID 10, all with various useable capacities. This calculator only has RAID 5. Why choose? The reasons are many, but most common are performance, protection and capacity. You choose, it's no different with us or any other vendor solution.

Second, "Disk rightsizing", a term used to explain why that 1TB hard drive you bought only shows ~932GB useable. Why? Well, that's because the hard drive vendors view 1MB as 1000 kbytes while your Operating system views 1MB as 1024 kbytes. That extra 24 bytes adds up which is why you truly don't get the actual hard size useable (this is before formatting it with your favorite file system as well). Again, nothing specific to use or any other vendor solution.

Third, Network RAID. What is Network RAID? Network RAID is a unique feature of the HP LeftHand SAN that allows you to CHOOSE on a per volume basis how many replicated copies of your LUN / VOLUME are distributed across the SAN. What is unique about this is it's DYNAMIC. You get to choose which volumes have it and which do not. What it offers you is the ability to survive entire node failures; if your nodes are physically separated and you lose an entire physical sites, your data remains online and available.

Hardware RAID is usually a set it and forget it configuration, and it's seldom changed. Network RAID is dynamic, because you as the customer choose to turn it on or off depending on the application protection needs. With that choice, you select the use of additional capacity to protect your data in a manner superior to standard hardware RAID. They key point here is choice. You have the choice, and if you change your mind, the system is dynamic and allows you to change the level of data protection on a per volume basis as often as desired. Unfortunately, a calculator without options isn't very reflective of real life. In essence, the above calculator was missing the infamous *Your mileage may vary...

To quote our previous blog poster "Unlike NetApp's space efficiency calculator, the LHN Duplication Calculator I've designed doesn't have any input fields or buttons..."

The HP Centralized Management interface WE designed, does have buttons, and even drop-downs, allowing you to choose how your capacity is used, ALWAYS.

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Making virtualization easy

CalvinZ — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:24:00 GMT

By John Spiers (Former CTO and a founder of LeftHand Networks, now working for HP StorageWorks)

If you haven't taken a look at the new HP virtualization bundles, you definitely should. The virtualization bundles provide an end-to-end solution that delivers application high availability without external storage. Sounds like a contradiction? Read on!

It has been characterized as a "mini-Matrix system", offering server, virtualization, storage and networking products configured and tested to reach the full potential of server virtualization. These bundles include ProLiant G6 servers, VMware's vSphere 4 virtualization software, ProCurve networking Switches, HP LeftHand P4000 and HP's Insight Control Suite (ICE) for management.

My colleague recently wrote about the virtualization bundles and it got me thinking about how unique these bundles are for SMBs and other companies looking to improve application availability and cost savings through virtualization.

Allow me to elaborate...

HP positions these easy-to-buy bundles as solutions that reduce the complexity and uncertainty of virtualization. You have rack or tower servers, highly available shared storage and networking with simple, centralized management.

Looking at the value of the bundles, Illuminata recently stated, "A major contributor to the value of what HP offers in these bundles is the fact that the requirement for acquiring, integrating and testing external SAN storage can be avoided."

We address one of the main hurdles on the way to server virtualization: the need for shared storage. Without shared, highly available storage VMotion, VMware HA or VMware FT cannot happen automatically, virtual machines cannot be moved and application users cannot be shielded from the outage of a physical server. If all you do is consolidate many virtual machines onto one physical server, you have basically placed all bets in one basket (traditionally knows as all eggs in one basket). Some workloads and business requirements can tolerate this scenario, yet many cannot. With HP LeftHand Virtual SAN Appliance, the internal server disks (and directly attached disks) can be pooled in a VMware environment and act like a pool of storage, like a virtual SAN. The IT administrator ends us using a SAN without ever having bought a SAN, a physical SAN that is!

The majority of these Virtualization Bundles include physical SAN nodes. And another secret is that servers and the SAN can not only failover, but automatically failback and incrementally re-sync the data on the primary SAN without manual intervention and with complete application data consistency using VMware's vSphere Fault Tolerance capability. Not to mention that these meaty bundles include software for snapshots, cloning, remote replication, thin provisioning, multi-site synchronous replication and advanced performance monitoring - at no additional charge.

With this new technology combination, HP is clearly establishing a new paradigm in server and storage virtualization. This is what customers have been asking for, for years and they can finally get it. I don't know of a single vendor server and SAN solution in the market today that is comparable.

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EVA Simplicity Challenge

CalvinZ — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 22:05:00 GMT

Back in early March, I talked about our storage virtualization announcement and pointed you to a video we did on the EVA. Well, I think I finally figured out how to embedded video in the blog (at least from YouTube), so I wanted to mention it it again and embedded the video. But first, here's a bit about the video.

Last year when we announced the EVA4400, we were just wrapping up some work with the Edison Group where we measured the time it took to perform specific storage administrative tasks on an EVA, Clariion CX, and NetApp FAS array. As a follow-up to the EVA4400 announcement, we brought some IT administrators to HP and asked them to perform a number of tasks on an EVA and Clariion array. The video was pretty good and was well received. So as we were getting ready to announce the EVA6400 and EVA8400 this year, we wanted to do another video to show just how easy the EVA with it's unique virtualization is to manage compared to competitive traditional arrays.

My original idea was to use either high school or college students; we'd have two groups - one a few football players and the other students taking high-tech classes. I was very confident that if we asked the football players to configure the EVA's and the tech students to work on the competitve arrays, the EVA would win hands down. A few folks on my team thought this could be a bit offensive, suggesting you really don't have to be educated to be an IT administrator. I saw it very differently - if HP StorageWorks can make products that simplify the time it takes to administrate their storage, that's really what our customers need - make it simple! I think the idea we used works just as well - we had three teams of high school students who each were asked to perform the same tasks on an EVA, Clariion CX4, and NetApp FAS array. As you'll see in the video, it appears as though the NetApp results are close but this is a bit misleading as we had to tell the students to skip some tasks on the FAS because no one could figure out how to do them.

With that background, there's the video:

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Come on - is the EVA really that easy to manage?

CalvinZ — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 20:31:00 GMT

By Calvin Zito

As I mentioned in my post titled Storage virtualization and the new EVA, the StorageWorks EVA is proving itself to be far easier to manage than competitive traditional disk arrays. Let me give you some of the back story here.

Last year, we commissioned an analyst team (The Edison Group) to measure the steps, clicks, and time it took to perform the most common array administrative tasks on several midrange arrays. They wrote a paper about those findings called "TCO White Paper: EMC, NetApp, and HP Midrange Storage Arrays". To be blunt, the paper never really measured TCO and in the end I thought it was the wrong title but it was still a good thing to see the time savings that we get with the EVA versus other arrays.

As I discussed in my post titled "Must See TV: EVA, EMC, and NetApp Go Head to Head" we brought customers to Houston to run some testing for us. You can find the video in the Must See TV post but there was also a white paper titled "Competitive Testing of Common Administrative Tasks" that gave more details on what happened through that testing. Again, interesting but still didn't give me what I wanted to see - how much can a customer save.

Fast forward to pulling together our announcement for the new EVA6400 and EVA8400. The thought was to do a survey of storage administrators on how they spend their day - meaning how often do they perform these different administrative tasks on their storage arrays. It seemed to me that if we had that data, we could then get to a time or cost savings when managing an EVA. This approach hit paydirt! Because the Edison Group had done the original testing, we turned to them again to survey administrators and calculate the savings. The paper based on this research is called "Comparative Management Cost Survey" Let me briefing summarize the results:

The total workday savings of an organization using an EVA as compared to EMC is 36 percent. When compared to NetApp, the savings are 50 percent. Workday savings is a term Edison uses to describe the value of an employee's daily work averaged over a year.

So when you hear us say the EVA costs up to 50% less to manage than other competitive traditional disk arrays, you know now why we can confidently say that. If you aren't using EVA's today, can you really afford to spend 2X managing the other guys' arrays, especially in today's economy?

One last point - I'm sure the competition will try to come up with 30 different reasons why our conclusions are wrong. EMC already tried to debunk the original Edison report by having an EMC engineer perform the same tasks on a Clariion and time the results they got. Well, duh! If I have an EVA engineer do the same tasks that Edison did I'm sure they'd complete them faster too. I would love to put all of these products to a joint test - have the best and brighest engineers from each company perform these tasks on their own storage array and everyone posts the results to their website. Somehow I don't get the sense that this is a challenge that either EMC or NetApp will want to touch.

Have a great weekend!

Must see TV: EVA, EMC, and NetApp go head to head

CalvinZ — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 04:03:00 GMT

By Calvin Zito

Last year when we announced the EVA4400, we brought some customers and partners to Houston who were not familiar with the management of either the EVA or EMC Clariion CX array. We gave them a list of tasks to complete and then created a video of that. It was one of the most popular videos of the last year on hp.com. The test showed that for the tasks these customers were asked to accomplish, they clearly thought the EVA was far easier to manage.

As we were preparing to announce the EVA6400 and EVA8400, we wanted to create an interesting video that would again make the point of how easy the EVA is to manage compared to competitive disk arrays. So the idea that we came up with was to have some high school students who are taking technical classes at their local high school (e.i. technology saavy) but not SAN or disk array experts put the EVA and competitive arrays to the test. The result is the HP StorageWorks EVA Simplicity Challenge. I don't want to spoil the fun for you but I'll make one comment about the results - the only reason the NetApp FAS system was even close was because no one could figure out how to do a snapshot on the NetApp system. So while the results look close, I personally thought we should have elimimated them from the results all together but we decided to keep their results in the video and note that doing the snapshots was beyond the scope of the test (in other words, was way too hard to figure out).

By the way, I wonder if my EMC blogger buddies have noticed that the EVA now has SSD drives - about a year a sooner than they predicted because to paraphrase their point of view, HP is a server company and can't innovate in storage. Of course, EMC doesn't have a virtualized storage array so what else can they say!