Around the Storage Block Blog - All Comments

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

Andrew — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 12:54:20 GMT

@CalvinZ

Marketing people amaze me...because one customer has a use case that doesn't fit the model, but they tried it anyway and it didn't work, then all of a (competitor's) product features must be bad and perform terribly.

I'm sure there are use cases where the EVA and XP don't shine either, but that doesn't make the product as a whole an under performer or not worth having. I really think you people wake up in the morning and think to yourselves, "How little of the truth can I tell so that my company comes out looking like the winner?". And no, I don't limit that to just you and HP...NetApp does it, 3PAR does it, and EMC probably does it the worst.

And to that customer...who in their right mind blindly enables a feature that has the potential to be disruptive on production data? Your admin(s) need to find a new career.

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

John — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 12:01:37 GMT

One thing often not mentioned is that the implementation of a Vfiler is completely disruptive to a customers environment. You have to serve up LUN's from an EVA or any other block storage device to the Vfiler. But before the Vfiler can make use of these LUN's they have to be formatted with the WAFL file system. So either a fair ammount of swing capacity is required or a large amount of downtime for restore of data into the WAFL file system is required.

On the subject of SSSU and RSM, completely agree the two are provided as a convenience at no extra cost. There's nothing in either tool that can't be completed through the Commandview GUI. They just offer additional flexibility around hands off scheduling and batch configuration processes.

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

CalvinZ — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 06:46:40 GMT

Thanks for all of the comments. A few things:

A recent comment came in on a post (www.communities.hp.com/.../deduplication-online-storage-and-cannibals.aspx) we had done over a year ago on dedup of primary storage. The customer said this:

We had a very painful experience with NetApp Asis; the admins did not read the fine print and just enabled the dedupe "to save space". After a month, the NFS latency hiked up to 50k ms renders filer completely useless. After numerous perfstat collections, the NetApp tech support still had no clue. It is one of our senior storage admin who spot the problem.

We saw the huge performance penalty on the engineering data.. it took 14 days to finish one run of asis and while asis is running, it consumed more than 30% of CPU cycles. And because of the nature of the data (high turn over rate), it really is a terrible idea to run dedupe. The second lesson we learned was.. even on a volume with moderate modification, there are still price to pay for large sequential reads. Just as the best practice ( tr3505) has suggested if one is sensitive to read/write performance, one should be cautiousl with dedupe. There is no free lunch.

DeltaFord - RSM is not a required GUI; Command View does everything that RSM does though it might take a few more steps. SSSU is a command line interface to Command View and is provided for those who prefer a command line. Again, it isn't required but is provided as a convenience.
With the new Command View SVSP that we just announced this week, any one looking to pool the capacity of multiple EVA's has even more reason to look at SVSP. Take a listen to the podcast that I just published as we hit on this topic: www.communities.hp.com/.../converged-infrastructure-block-based-storage-virtualization-podcast.aspx
For any customer consider the ZIP program, I'd highly recommend that you talk to your HP rep first and learn more about the SVSP. I am very confident that 95% of our EVA customers that would consider the vSeries would be better served with the StorageWorks SVSP.
Michael - I'll pass on your comments to our R&D team. I've not heard of that issue before but I'm also not directly in the loop with our support team. Feel free to use the "Contact" link at the top right side of the page if you'd like to give me more details.

Thanks for all the comments

re: Converged Infrastructure podcast with Sr. VP and GM of StorageWorks Dave Roberson

CalvinZ — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 06:15:06 GMT

Hi Bob,

I didn't know we had a way to download our podcasts until I went off and asked as a result of your question. I've added the link that you can right-click on to download the MP3 file. Thanks for requesting this or I might not have figured out this trick.

re: Converged Infrastructure podcast with Sr. VP and GM of StorageWorks Dave Roberson

Bob Kentwortz — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:29:06 GMT

Please make "podcasts" something I can download to my iPod! If I can not download the file and play locally, I am at the mercy of the internet and available bandwidth -- which is not enough to listen this morning. I hear the talk in bits and pieces with large download gaps in between. I end up not listening to it at all. Which is not the point. Please make it easy for me to get the message.

re: Box score for NetApp capacity calculator

Ken Mueller — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:43:24 GMT

Chris-

If you look carefully at that Avanade paper, you will see those failover times have nothing to do with the NetApp storage array. Those downtime numbers represent the time it took for MSCS to stop/start Exchange services gracefully or harshly. In fact, Avanade didn't induce a storage array failure during their testing, so it would be erroneous for you to compare your personal LeftHand HA experience with NetApp based on that paper.

-Ken

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

Andrew — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:49:47 GMT

While I agree that during the execution of the job that does the deduplication of data on a FAS it is slower, I have yet to see any performance impact on my FAS3140s for deduplicated data at any other time. The initial job takes a while (~2 hours for 2 TB of VMs), after that it takes minutes a day to run. I'm willing to make the trade off when it means that I can have > 250 virtual machines (each with a 20GB operating system HDD) on a single 2TB volume, and we still have room to spare.

The best part...since we moved to OnTAP 7.3, which makes the cache dedupe aware, we've seen a huge reduction in the number of disk operations for our virtual machines...and because the amount of VM data has been reduced in the cache, more of the application data sits in cache, which makes response times for apps better as well (we keep the operating system drives for the VMs on one volume and the application data on multiple others).

Yes, we are aware that cache saturation could occur, at which point we could suffer from the dedupe, but it's a lot cheaper to buy a PAM than more spindles when capacity isn't the issue.

Don't misunderstand me, I like the EVA, it does a tremendous job for some of our Oracle databases (which have an extremely random IO pattern) because we are getting the benefit of having all of the disk's IOPs available to us, but for VMs, and the majority of our applications, using a FAS is what works best for us.

And, I'm very sorry, but no matter how much you try to convince me, DCM is not the same as thin provisioning. Anytime someone tries to convince me that a LUN can be thin provisioned I'm skeptical...even NetApp. What NetApp can do is true thin provisioning of NFS and CIFS datastores, and that is extremely helpful...especially for our user home directories and profiles.

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

DeltaFord — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:08:09 GMT

"The HP StorageWorks EVA has one - Command View"

Being a HP customer running multiple EVA:s, all generations since its realease, this marketing statement always annoys me. HP knows very well that in order to fully use and manage the EVA you must use multiple user interfaces, CV, RSM and to some extent SSSU.

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

Michael Leu — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:16:18 GMT

We are running two vSeries in front of two EVAs. For me (the EVA admin) the vSeries (managed as a NAS by the windows team) look just like another pair of hosts, but with the following drawbacks:

- only 60% of the space I allocate is usable

- no support for EVA 4400

On the other hand, Command View EVA is far from perfect. When it works, it's great. But just this week both of our CV servers where totally unusable because one operation to one EVA (of a total of 9) did hang, blocking ALL management of ALL EVAs. So what's the solution? Reboot the master controller of the misbehaving EVA... not very elegant.

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

Chris Wong — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 01:10:35 GMT

Currently having a NetApp FAS system after considering both HP EVA and NetApp FAS gear, and I can identify with the annoyances of having multiple GUIs for management of our FAS. One GUI seems to be better for some tasks, while another seems better for other tasks. It looks like things will move primarily to the MMC-based NetApp System Manager, which is not bad, but is still lacking as it's a 1.0 version. About dedup, we saw space savings of 75% after moving 400 GB in our primary VMs to NetApp iSCSI LUNs, and then about 50% savings after moving most of our 5-6 TB in VMs to our NetApp. Obviously, performance was not the best while the dedup jobs were running, and we are aware of the potential hit in having shared blocks, but we did not notice any performance hit while running our VMs on dedup’d storage after the dedup jobs completed. And while we don't like some of the ways that NetApp works with disks and we can't fully take advantage of all of our raw space (in part because of the way that an active/active FAS is basically like running 2 storage systems on shared hardware), we still think it's a preferable situation to needing to pay HP licensing on the amount of data that we have (at least that's the way it was when we last looked at HP EVA storage). We are a backup and recovery services provider, so we felt like we were being penalized for being successful and growing our business. We already pay for shelves and disks, so why should we also have to pay on a per TB basis or even an unlimited storage basis just to put our data on those disks...? I believe there is licensing associated with EVA Command View as well – seriously, licensing on the management software…? The other thing that makes FAS systems really appealing is that they are multi-protocol systems; we really like being able to use pretty much whatever protocol that's needed, and they're all in the same box. NAS is a big part of what we do as well, and we didn't feel like we'd get the best NAS performance by continuing with our existing practice of placing regular file servers in front of SAN storage, as is the case with the HP EVA File Services option.

re: HP LeftHand capacity

Chris Brown — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 01:58:40 GMT

Hi Charles,

The volume will stay online and you will just need to replace the drive and let it rebuild.

Thanks,

Chris

re: HP LeftHand capacity

Charles — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:58:30 GMT

I have 2 NSM2060s in a cluster. Both nodes are set with RAID 5. If I have a very large volume that spans multiple drives and one of the drives fail in that volume (with no replication level set), will the volume stay online? If so will I have to simply replace the drive and let it rebuild? If not, does the data become inconsistent on that volume and I will have to restore? Thanks! Great article.

Charles

re: FCoE...it's almost time to get moving!

GregEdwards — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:39:39 GMT

Speaking to cisco UCS reps, Scott Lowe is correct...for now. You still need an FC switch...but that won't be for long.

re: Easier storage for SAP - only from HP StorageWorks

Marcel Duvekot — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:36:36 GMT

Every other solution we’ve seen on the market offers replication software (most of the time some backup tool) alongside a services contract, not a customer-installable application specific solution.

Creating space-efficient snapshots is by nature, and should always be, a very fast operation on any storage system. The ability to create these spaces-efficient copies, along with the necessary integration into database systems to ensure a transactional consistent and recoverable copy, is a given for any solution. HP has several application solutions that enable users to create these types of copies at any point in time, but most of them are focused on the array replication point of view and not the application specific point of view.

The difference (and exceptional value) that SAP users get with HP System Copy Software for SAP is an SAP specific solution that is user installable. You do not need any specialist or services contract to install and configure this solution, or to develop some custom scripts. HP System Copy automates the entire processes of creating and renaming a copy of an SAP system. This includes automatically:

• Discovering the source SAP system Storage layout

• Creating the point-in-time copy of the sources system data devices (either space efficient snapshots or full copy replicas (and both of these are created within a few minutes - even a full copy can be accessed long before the actual disk copy is complete). And yes in a lot of cases customers still wants a full copy of production too.

• Importing and renaming the file systems on the target server

• Renaming the database and the SAP instance

Each of these steps is automated, and it can be done from a single management GUI.

HP had a Services/Scripts based solution for many years. The learning from this offering is what went into the System Copy offering.

With this customer installable software, HP simply takes SAP system copy automation to a higher level, making it a fast commodity operation for the customer's SAP administrator (no other admins required). Customers (or services) do not need to maintain scripts. Scripts generally offer a cool solution at installation time, but tend to cause customer headaches later in the IT lifecycle. Not to mention knowledge dependencies for all layers of the stack (storage, O/S, DB, SAP, script languages). HP solves this issue now by offering an end-to-end engineered and qualified software product, which offers great ROI for many of our customers.

re: StorageWorks Tech Day - in their words so far....

Daddy83 — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 09:47:36 GMT

Thats awsome. Hey, this reminds me of Dreamworks character design. ,