Category Efficiency

Hi! You might remember me from such blog posts as: EMC 20% Unified Storage Guarantee !EXPOSED! and the informational EMC Unified Storage Capacity Calculator – The Tutorial! – Well, here I’d like to bring to you the final word on this matter! (Well, my final word.. I’m sure well after I’m no longer discussing this… You will be, which is cool, I love you guys and your collaboration!)

Disclaimer: I am in no way saying I am the voice of EMC, nor am I assuming that Mike Richardson is infact the voice of NetApp, but I know we’re both loud, so our voices are heard regardless :)

So on to the meat of the ‘argument’ so to speak (That’d be some kind of vegan meat substitute being that I’m vegan!)

EMC Unified Storage Guarantee

I find it’d be useful if I quote the text of the EMC Guarantee, and then as appropriate drill down into each selected section in our comparable review on this subject.

It’s easy to be efficient with EMC.

EMC® unified storage brings efficiency to a whole new level. We’ve even created a capacity calculator so you can configure efficiency results for yourself. You’ll discover that EMC requires 20% less raw capacity to achieve your unified storage needs. This translates to superior storage efficiency when compared to other unified storage arrays—even those utilizing their own documented best practices.

If we’re not more efficient, we’ll match the shortfall

If for some unlikely reason the capacity calculator does not demonstrate that EMC is 20% more efficient, we’ll match the shortfall with additional storage. That’s how confident we are.

The guarantee to end all guarantees

Storage efficiency is one of EMC’s fundamental strengths. Even though our competitors try to match it by altering their systems, turning off options, changing defaults or tweaking configurations—no amount of adjustments can counter the EMC unified storage advantage.

Here’s the nitty-gritty, for you nitty-gritty types

• The 20% guarantee is for EMC unified storage (file and block—at least 20% of each)
• It’s based on out-of-the-box best practices
• There’s no need to compromise availability to achieve efficiency
• There are no caveats on types of data you must use
• There’s no need to auto-delete snapshots to get results

This guarantee is based on standard out-of-the-box configurations. Let us show you how to configure your unified storage to get even more efficiency. Try our capacity calculator today.

Okay, now that we have THAT part out of the way.. What does this mean? Why am I stating the obvious (so to speak)  Let’s drill this down to the discussions at hand.

The 20% guarantee is for EMC unified storage (file and block—at least 20% of each)

This is relatively straight-forward.  It simply says “Build a Unified Configuration – which is Unified” SAN is SAN, NAS is NAS, but when you combine them together you get a Unified Configuration! – Not much to read in to that.  Just that you’re likely to see the benefit of 20% or greater in a Unified scenario, than you are in a comparable SAN or NAS only scenario.

It’s based on out-of-the-box best practices

I cannot stress this enough.   Out-Of-Box Best practices.   What does that mean?    Universally, I can build a configuration which will say to this “20% efficiency guarantee” Muhahah! Look what I did! I made this configuration which CLEARLY is less than 20%! Even going into the negative percentile! I AM CHAMPION GIVE ME DISK NOW!".   Absolutely.  I’ve seen it, and heard it touted (Hey, even humor me as I discuss a specific use-case which me and Mike Richardson have recently discussed.)    But building a one-off configuration which makes your numbers appear ‘more right’ v using your company subscribed best practices (and out of box configurations) is what is being proposed here.   If it weren’t for best practices we’d have R0 configurations spread across every workload, with every feature and function under the sun disabled to say ‘look what I can doo!”

So, I feel it is important to put this matter to bed (because so many people have been losing their time and sleep over this debate and consideration)  I will take this liberty to quote from a recent blog post by Mike Richardson – Playing to Lose, Hoping to Win: EMC’s Latest Guarantee (Part 2)    In this article written by Mike he did some –great- analysis.  We’re talking champion.  He went through and used the calculator, built out use-cases and raid groups, really gave it a good and solid run through (which I appreciate!)   He was extremely honest, forthright and open and communicative about his experience, configuration and building this out with the customer in mind.   To tell you the truth, Mike truly inspired me to follow-up with this final reprise.

Reading through Mike’s article I would like to quote (in context) the following from it:

The configuration I recommend is to the left.  With 450GB FC drives, the maximum drive count you can have in a 32bit aggr is 44.  This divides evenly into 2 raidgroups of 20+2.  I am usually comfortable recommending between 16 and 22 RG size, although NetApp supports FC raidgroup sizes up to 28 disks.  Starting with the same amount of total disks (168 – 3 un-needed spares), the remaining disks are split into 8 RAID DP raidgroups. After subtracting an additional 138GB for the root volumes, the total usable capacity for either NAS or SAN is just under 52TB.

I love that Mike was able to share this image from the Internal NetApp calculator tool (It’s really useful to build out RG configurations) and it gives a great breakdown of disk usage.

For the sake of argument for those who cannot make it out from the picture, what Mike has presented here is a 22 disk RAID-DP RG (20+2 disks – Made up of 168 FC450 disks with 7 spares) I’d also like to note that snapshot reserve has been changed from the default of 20% to 0% in the case of this example.

Being I do not have access to the calculator tool which Mike used, I used my own spreadsheet run calculator which more or less confirms what Mike’s tool is saying to be absolutely true!   But this got me thinking!    (Oh no! Don’t start thinking on me now!)    And I was curious.   Hey, sure this deviates from best practices a bit, right? But BP’s change at times, right?

So being that I rarely like to have opinions of my own, and instead like to base it on historical evidence founded factually and referenced in others… I sent the following txt message to various people I know (Some Former Netappians’s, some close friends who manage large scale enterprise NetApp accounts, etc (etc is for the protection of those I asked ;))

The TXT Message was: “Would you ever create a 20+2 FC RG with netapp?”

That seems pretty straight forward.   Right? Here is a verbatim summation of the responses I received.

• Sorry, I forgot about this email.  To be brief, NO.
• “It depends, I know (customer removed) did 28, 16 is the biggest I would do”
• I would never think to do that… unless it came as a suggestion from NetApp for some perfemance reasons… (I blame txting for typo’s ;))
• Nope we never use more then 16
• Well rebuild times would be huge.

So, sure this is a small sampling (of the responses I received) but I notice a resonating pattern there.   The resounding response is a NO.   But wait, what does that have to do with a hole in the wall?   Like Mike said, NetApp can do RG sizes of up to 28 disks.   Also absolutely 100% accurate, and in a small number of use-cases I have found situations in which people have exceeded 16 disk RG’s.   So, I decided to do a little research and see what the community has said on this matter of RG sizes. (This happened out of trying to find a Raid6 RG Rebuild Guide – I failed)

I found a few articles I’d like to reference here:

• Raid Group size 8, 16, 28?

  • According to the resiliency guide Page 11:

    NetApp recommends using the default RAID group sizes when using RAID-DP.

  • Eugene makes some good points here –

    • All disks in an aggregate are supposed to participate in IO operations.  There is a performance penalty during reconstruction as well as risks; "smaller" RG sizes are meant to minimize both.

    • There is a maximum number of data disks that can contribute space to an aggregate for a 16TB aggregate composed entirely of a give disk size, so I’ve seen RG sizes deviate from the recommended based on that factor (You don’t want/need a RG of 2 data+2parity just to add 2 more data disks to an aggr….). Minimizing losses to parity is not a great solution to any capacity issue.

    • my $0.02.

  • An enterprise account I’m familiar has been using NetApp storage since F300 days and they have tested all types of configurations and have found performance starts to flatline after 16 disks.  I think the most convincing proof that 16 is the sweet spot is the results on spec.org.  NetApp tests using 16 disk RAID groups.

    • Particularly compelling especially coming from NetApp PSE – mcope

• Raid group size recommendation

  • Okay, maybe not the best reference considering I was fairly active in the response on the subject in July and August of 2008 in this particular thread.  Though read through it if you like, I guess the best take away I can get from it (which I happened to have said…)
    • I was looking at this from two aspects: Performance, and long-term capacity.
    • My sources for this were a calculator and capacity documents.
    • Hopefully this helped bring some insight into the operation  and my decisions around it.
      • (Just goes to show… I don’t have opinions… only citeable evidence Well, and real world customer experiences as well;))
  • Raid group size with FAS3140 and DS4243
    • I found this in the DS4243 Disk Shelf Technical FAQ document
    • WHAT ARE THE BEST PRACTICES FOR CONFIGURING RAID GROUPS IN FULLY LOADED CONFIGURATIONS?
    • For one shelf: two RAID groups with maximum size 12. (It is possible in this case that customers will configure one big RAID group of size 23–21 data and 2 parity; however, NetApp recommends two RAID groups).
  • Managing performance degradation over time
  • Aggregate size and "overhead" and % free rules of thumb.
  • Why should we not reserve Snap space for SAN volumes?
    • All around good information, conversation and discussion around filling up Aggr’s – No need to drill down to a specific point.

So, what does all of this mean other than the fact that I appear to have too much time on my hands? :)

Well, to sum up what I’m seeing and considering we are in the section titled ‘out of box best practices’

1. Best Practices and recommendations (as well as expert guidance and general use) seem to dictate a 14+2, 16 disk RG
   1. Can that number be higher.  Yes, but that would serve to be counter to out-of-box best practices, not to mention it seems your performance will not benefit as seen in the comments mentioned above (and the fact that spec.org tests are run in that model)
2. By default the system will have a reserve, and not set to 0% – so if I were to strip out all of the reserve which is there for a reason – my usable capacity will go up in spades, but I’m not discussing a modified configuration; I’m comparing against a default, out-of-box best practices configuration, which by default calls for a 5% aggr snap reserve, 20% vol snap reserve for NAS and a SAN Fractional Reserve of 100%
   1. Default Snapshot reserve, and TR-3483 helps provide backing information and discussion around this subject. (Friendly modifications from Aaron Delp’s NetApp Setup Cheat Sheet)
3. In order to maintain these ‘out of box best practices’ and enable for a true model of thin provisioning (albeit, not what I am challenging here, especially being that Mike completely whacked the reserve space for snapshots – Nonetheless… in our guarantee side of the house we have the ‘caveat’ of “There’s no need to auto-delete snapshots to get results” – Which is simply saying, Even if you were to have your default system out of box, in order to achieve, strive and take things to the next level you would need to enable “Volume Auto-Grow” on NetApp, or it’s sister function “Snap Auto Delete” the first of which is nice as it’s not disruptive to your backups, but you can’t grow when you’ve hit your peak! So your snapshots would then be at risk.   Don’t put your snapshots at risk!
4. Blog posts are not evidence for updating of Best Practices, nor does it change your defaults out of box.   What am I talking about here?  (Hi Dimitris!)   Dimitri wrote this –great- blog post NetApp usable space – beyond the FUD whereby he goes into the depth and discussion of what we’ve been talking about these past weeks, he makes a lot of good points, and even goes so far as to validate a lot of what I’ve said, which I greatly appreciate.    But taking things a little too far, he ‘recommends’ snap reserve 0, fractional reserve 0, snap autodelete on, etc.    As a former NetApp engineer I would strongly recommend a lot of ‘changes’ to the defaults and the best practices as the use-case fit, however I did not set a holistic “Let’s win this capacity battle at the sake of compromising my customers data”   And by blindly doing exactly what he suggested here, you are indeed putting your data integrity and recovery at risk.   

I’ve noticed that.. I actually covered all of the other bullet points in this article without needing to actually drill into them separately.  :) So, allow me to do some summing up on this coverage.

If we compare an EMC RAID6 Configuration to a NetApp RAID-DP Configuration, with file and block (at least 20% of each) using out of box default best practices, you will be able to achieve no compromise availability, no compromise efficiency regardless of data type, with no need to auto-delete your snapshots to gain results.   So that’s a guarantee you can write home about, 20% guaranteed in ‘caveats’ you can fit into a single paragraph (and not a 96 page document ;))

Now, I’m sure, no.. Let me give a 100% guarantee… that someone is going to call ‘foul’ on this whole thing, and this will be the hot-bed post of the week, I completely get it.   But what you the reader really are wondering “Yea, 20% Guarantee.. Guarantee of what? How am I supposed to learn about Unified?”

Welcome to the EMC Unified Storage – Next Generation Efficiency message!

Welcome to the EMC Unisphere – Next Generation Storage Management Simplicity

I mean, obviously once you’re over the whole debate of ‘storage, capacity, performance’ you want to actually be able to pay to play (or, $0 PO to play, right? ;))

But I say.. Why wait?  We’re all intelligent and savvy individuals.  What if I said you could in the comfort of your own home (or lab) start playing with this technology today with little effort on your behalf.     I say, don’t wait.   Go download now and start playing.

For those of you who are familiar with the infamous Celerra VSA as published in Chad’s blog numerous times New Celerra VSA (5.6.48.701) and Updated “SRM4 in a box” guide things have recently gone to a whole new level with the introduction of Nicholas Weaver’s UBER VSA!  Besser UBER : Celerra VSA UBER v2 – Which takes the ‘work’ out of set up.  In fact, all set up requires is an ESX Server, VMware Workstation, VMware Fusion (or in my particular case, I do testing on VMware Viewer to prove you can do it) and BAM! You’re ready to go and you have a Unified array at your disposal!

Celerra VSA UBER Version 2 – Workstation
Celerra VSA UBER Version 2 – OVA (ESX)

Though I wouldn’t stop there, if you’re already talking Unified and playing with File data at all, run don’t walk to download (and play with) the latest FMA Virtual Appliance! Get yer EMC FMA Virtual Appliance here!

But don’t let sillie little Powerpoint slides tell you anything about it, listen to talking heads on youtube instead :)

I won’t include all of the videos here, but I adore the way the presenter in this video says ‘series’ :) – But, deep dive and walk through in FMA in Minutes!

• FMA/VE HOWTO 101 – Setting up the EMC FMA Virtual Edition
• FMA/VE HOWTO 201 – Setting up the Celerra to integrate with EMC FMA/VE
• FMA/VE HOWTO 301 – Configuring EMC FMA/VE
• FMA/VE HOWTO 401 – Implementing EMC FMA/VE
• FMA/VE HOWTO 501 – Use Case Walkthrough
  • You can download the VMware vSphere ESX OVA (644MB) here.
  • You can download the VMware Workstation version (655MB) here.
  • You can download the documentation here…

Okay! Fine! I’ve downloaded the Unified VSA, I’ve checked out FMA and seen how it might help.. but how does this help my storage efficiency message? What are you trying to tell me?  If I leave you with anything at this point, let’s break it down into a few key points.

• Following best practices will garner you a 20% greater efficiency before you even start to get efficient with technologies like Thin Provisioning, FAST, Fast Cache, FMA, etc
• With the power of a little bandwidth, you’re able to download fully functional Virtual Appliances to allow you to play with and learn the Unified Storage line today.
• The power of managing your File Tiering architecture and Archiving policy is at your finger tips with the FMA Virtual Appliance.
• I apparently have too much time on my hands.  (I actually don’t… but it can certainly look that way :))
• Talk to your TC, Rep, Partner (whoever) about Unified.   Feel free to reference this blog post if you want, if there is nothing else to learn from this, I want you – the end user to be educated :)
• I appreciate all of your comments, feedback, positive and negative commentary on the subject.  I encourage you to question everything, me, the competition, the FUD and even the facts.   I research first, ask questions, ask questions later and THEN shoot.    The proof is in the pudding.  Or in my case, a unique form of Vegan pudding.

Good luck out there, I await the maelstrom, the fun, the joy.   Go download some VSA’s, watch some videos, and calculate, calculate, calculate!   Take care! – Christopher :)

The latest update to this is included here in the Final Reprise! EMC 20% Unified Storage Guarantee: Final Reprise

For those of you who know me (and those who don’t, hi! Pleased to meet you!) I spent a lot of time at NetApp battling the storage efficiency game, always trying to justify where all of the storage space went in a capacity bound situation.   However since joining EMC, all I would ever hear from the competition is how ‘space inefficient’ we were and frankly, I’m glad to see the release of the EMC Capacity Calculator to let you decide for yourself where your efficiency goes.   Recently we announced this whole "Unified Storage Guarantee" and to be honest with you, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. So I decided to take the marketing hype, set it on fire and start drilling down into the details, because that’s the way I roll. :)

I decided to generate two workload sets side by side to compare what you get when you use the Calculators

I have a set of requirements – ~131TB of File/Services data, and 4TB of Highly performing random IO SAN storage

There is an ‘advisory’ on the EMC guarantee that you have at least 20% SAN and 20% NAS in order to guarantee a 20% space efficiency over others – So I modified my configuration to include at least 20% of both SAN and NAS (But let me tell you, when I had it as just NAS.. It was just as pretty :))

Using NetApp’s Storage Efficiency Calculator I assigned the following data:

That seems pretty normal, nothing too out of the ordinary – I left all of the defaults otherwise as we all know that ‘cost per TB’ is relative depending upon any number of circumstances!

So, I click ‘Calculate’ and it generates this (beautiful) web page, check it out! – There is other data at the bottom which is ‘cut off’ due to my resolution, but I guarantee it was nothing more than marketing jibber jabber and contained no technical details.

So, taking a look at that – this is pretty sweet, it gives me a cool little tubular breakdown, tells me that to meet my requirements of 135TB I’ll require 197TB in my NetApp Configuration – that’s really cool, it’s very forthright and forth coming.

What’s even cooler is there are checkboxes I can uncheck in order to ‘equalize’ things so to speak. And considering that the EMC Guarantee is based upon Useable up front without enabling any features! Let me take this moment to establish some equality for a second.

All I’ve done is uncheck Thin Provisioning (EMC can do that too, but doesn’t require you to do that as part of the Guarantee, because we all know… some times… customers WON’T thin provision certain workloads, so I get it!)   Also turning off deduplication, just so I get a good feel for how many spindles I’ll be eating up from a performance perspective – And turning off dev/test clone (which didn’t really make much difference since I had little DB in this configuration)

Now, through no effort of my own, the chart updated a little bit to report that NetApp now requires 387TB to manage the same workload a second ago required 197TB. That’s a little odd, but hey, what do I know.. This is just a calculator taking data and presenting it to me!

Now… with the very same details thrown into the EMC Capacity Calculator, lets take a look at how it looks.

According to this, I start with a Raw Capacity of ~207TB and through all of the ways as defined on screen, I end up with 135TB Total usable, with at least 20% SAN and about twice that in NAS – Looks fairly interesting, right?

But lets take things one step further. Let’s scrap Snapshots on both sides of the fence. Throw caution in to the wind.. No snapshots.. What does that do to my capacity requirements for the same ~135TB Usable I was looking for in the original configurations.

On the NetApp side I reclaim 27TB of Useable space (to make it 360TB Raw)- while on the EMC side I reclaim 15TB of useable space [150TB Useable now] while Still 207TB Raw.

But we both know the value of having snapshots in these file-type data scenarios, so we’ll leave the snapshots enabled – and now it’s time to do some math – Help me as I go through this, and pardon any errors.

However, just because I care (and I wanted to see what happened) I decided to say "Screw the EMC Guarantee" and threw all caution to the wind and decided to compare a pure-play SAN v SAN scenario, just to see how it’d look.

I swapped out the numbers to be Database Data, Email/Collaboration Data – The results don’t change (Eng Data seems to have a minor 7TB Difference.. Not sure why that is, – feel free to manipulate the numbers yourself though, it’s negligible)

And I got this rocking result! (Yay, right?!) 202TB seems to be my requirement with all the checkboxes checked! But this is Exchange and Sharepoint data (or notes.. I’m not judging what email/collab means ;))… I’m being honest and realistic with myself, so I’m not going to thin provision or Dedup it any way, so how does that change the picture?

It looks EXACTLY the same [as before]. Well, that’s cool, at least it is consistent, right?

However, doing the same thing on the EMC side of the house.

I want to note a few differences in this configuration – I upgraded to a 480 because I used exclusively 600GB FC drives as I’m not even going to lie to myself that I’m humoring my high IO workloads on 2TB SATA Disks – If you disagree you let me know, but I’m trying to keep it real :)

RAID5 is good enough with FC disks (If this was SATA I’d be doing best practice and assigning RAID6 as well, so keeping it true and honest) And it looks like this:

(Side Note: It looks like this SAN Calculation has only 1 hot spare declared instead of the 6 used above in the other configuration – I’m not sure why that is, but I’m not going to consider 5 disks as room for concern so far as my calculations go – it is not reflected in my % charts below – FYI!  I fixed the issue and introduced 6 Spare disks.  I also changed the system from 14+1 R5 sets to 4+1 and 8+1 R5 sets which seems to accurately reflect more production like workloads :))

Whoa, 200TB Raw Capacity to get me 135TB Usable? Whoa, now wait a second. (says the naysayers) You’re comparing RAID5 to RAID6 – that’s not a fair configuration because there is definitely going to be a discrepancy! And you have snapshots enabled too for this workload. (Side note: I do welcome you to compare RAID6 in this configuration, you’ll be surprised :))

I absolutely agree – so in the effort of equalization – I’m going to uncheck the Double Disk Failure Protection from the NetApp side (Against best practices, but effectively turning the NetApp configuration into a RAID4 config) and I’ll turn off Snapshot copies to be a fair sport.

There, it’s been done. The difference is.. That EMC RAW Capacity has stayed the same(200TB) while NetApp raw capacity has dropped considerably by 30TB from 387TB to 357TB. (I do like how it reports "Total Storage Savings – 0%" :))

So, what does all of this mean? Why do you keep taking screen caps, ahh!!

This gives you the opportunity to sit down, configure what it is YOU want, get a good feel for what configuration feels right to you and be open and honest with yourself and said configuration.

No matter how I try to swizzle it, I end up with EMC coming front and center on capacity utilization from RAW to Usable – Which down right devastates anything in comparison. I do want to qualify this though.

The ‘guarantee’ is that you’ll get 20% savings with both SAN and NAS. Apparently if I LIE to my configuration and say ‘Eh, I don’t care about that’ I still get OMG devastatingly positive results of capacity utilization. – So taking the two scenarios I tested in here and reviewing the math..

When we’re discussing apples for apples – We seem to be meeting the guarantee whether NAS, SAN or Unified.

If we were to take things to another boundary, out the gate I get the capacity I require – If I slap Virtual Provisioning, Compression, FAST Cache, Auto-Tiering, Snapshots and a host of other benefits that the EMC Unified line brings to solve your business challenges… well, to be honest it looks like you’re coming out on top no matter what way you look at it!

I welcome you to ‘prove me wrong’ based upon my calculations here (I’m not sure how that’s possible because I simply entered data which you can clearly see, and pressed little calculate buttons… so if I’m doing some voodoo, I’d really love to know)

I also like to try to keep this as realistic as possible and we all know some people like their NAS only or SAN only configurations. The fact that the numbers in the calculations are hitting it out of the ballpark so to speak is absolutely astonishing to me! (Considering where I worked before I joined EMC… well, I’m as surprised as you are!) But I do know the results to be true.

If you want to discuss these details further, reach out to me directly (christopher.kusek@emc.com) – or talk to your local TC (Or your TC, TC Manager and me in a nicely threaded email ;)) – They understand this rather implicitly.. I’m just a conduit to ensure you folks in the community are aware of what is available to you today!

Good luck, and if you can find a way to make the calculations look terrible – Let me know… I’m failing to do that so far :)

!UPDATE! !UPDATE! !UPDATE! :)  I was informed apparently every thing is not as it seems? (Which frankly is a breath of relief, whew!)

Latest news on the street is, apparently there is a bug in the NetApp Efficiency Capacity Calculator – So after that gets corrected, things should start to look a little more accurate, let me breathe a sigh of relief around that, because apparently (after being heavily slandered for ‘cooking the numbers’) the only inaccuracy going on there [as clearly documented] was in the source of my data.

However, being that I’m not going to go through and re-write everything I have above again, I wanted to take things down to their roots, lets get down into the dirt, the details, the raw specifics so to speak.  (If any thing in this chart below is somehow misrepresented, inaccurate or incorrect, please advise – This is based upon data I’ve collected over time, so hash it out as you feel :))

What I’ve done here is take the information and tried to ensure each one of these apples are as SIMILAR as possible.

So you don’t have to read between the lines either, let me break down this configuration – This assumes 28 SATA 1TB Disks, with 4 PARITY drives and 1 SPARE – in both configurations.

If you feel that I somehow magically made numbers appear to be or do something that they shouldn’t – Say so.   Use THIS chart here, don’t create your own build-a-config workshop table unless you feel this is absolutely worthless and that you truly need that to be done.   

You’ll notice that things like Parity Drives and Hot Spares are identical (As they should be) Where we start to enter into discrepancy is around things like WAFL Reserve, Core Dump Reserve and Aggr Snap Reserve – Certainly there are areas of overlap as shown above and equally the same can be said of areas of difference, which is why in those areas on the EMC side I use that space to define the CLARiiON OS and the Celerra OS.    I did have the EMC Match the default NetApp Configuration of a 20% vol snap reserve (on the EMC side I call it Check/Snap Reserve) [Defaults to 10% on EMC, but for the sake of solidarity, what’s 20% amongst friends, right?]    (On a side note, I notice that my WAFL Reserve figures might actually be considerably conservative as a good friend gave me a dump of his WAFL Reserve and the result of his WAFL Reserve was 1% of total v raw compared to my 0.07% calculation I have above, maybe it’s a new thing?)

So, this is a whole bunch of math.. a whole bunch of jibber jabber even so to speak.   But this is what I get when I look at RAW numbers.   If I am missing some apparent other form of numbers, let it be known, but let’s discuss this holistically.     Both NetApp and EMC offer storage solutions.    NetApp has some –really- cool technology.  I know, I worked there.   EMC ALSO has some really cool technology, some of which NetApp is unable to even replicate or repeat.   But before we get in to cool tech battles, as we sit in a cage match watching PAM duel it out with FAST-Cache, or ‘my thin provisioning is better than yours’ grudge matches.    We have two needs we need to account for.

Customers have data that they need to protect.   Period.

Customers have requirements of a certain amount of capacity they expect to get from a certain amount of disks.

If you look at the chart closely, there are some OMFG ICANTBELIEVEITSNOTWAFL features which NetApp brings to bear, however they come at a cost.   That cost seems to exist in the form of WAFL Reserve, and Right sizing (I’m not sure why the Right Sizing is coming in a considerably fat consideration when contrasted with how EMC does it, but it apparently is?)  So while I can talk all day long about each individual specific feature NetApp has, and equivalent parity which EMC has in that same arena; I need to start somewhere.  And strangely going back to basics, seems to come to a 23% realized space savings in this scenario (Which seems inline with the EMC Unified Storage Guarantee) Which frankly, I find to be really cool.  Because like has been resonated by others commenting on this ‘guarantee’, what the figures appear to be showing is that the EMC Capacity utilization is more efficient even before it starts to get efficient (through enabling technologies).

Obviously though, for the record I’m apparently riddled with Vendor Bias and have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about! [disclaimer: I have no idea what I’m talking about when I define and disclose I am in this post and others ;)]   However, I’d like to go on record based upon these mathematical calculations, were I not an employee of EMC, and whether I did or did not work for NetApp in the past, I would have come to these same conclusions independently when presented with these same raw figures and numerical metrics.   I continue to welcome your comments, thoughts and considerations when it comes to a Capacity bound debate [Save performance for another day, we can have that battle out right ;)]  Since this IS a Pureplay CAPACITY conversation.

I hope you found this as informative as I did taking the time to create, generate, and learn from the experience of producing it.  Oh, and I hope you find the (unmoderated) comments enjoyable. :)   I’d love to moderate your comments, but frankly… I’d rather let you and the community handle that on my behalf.   I love you guys, and you too Mike Richardson even if you were being a bit snarky to me. {Hmm, a bit snarky or a byte snarky… Damn binary!}  Take care – And Thank you for making this my most popular blog-post since Mafia Wars and Twitter content! :)

The latest update to this is included here in the Final Reprise! EMC 20% Unified Storage Guarantee: Final Reprise

I got asked a –great- question the other day by my boss (Props to my boss for giving me some great blogging material!)

“What are the Top 5 things you learned or thought valuable at EMC World 2010”

I cannot guarantee I’ll give you 5 top things… or that I won’t even exceed 5 things, but at the very least I’ll outline what I found as the most valuable things, as well as discussions I had with various others as to what was the most valuable to be had/found!   If there are things you found particularly useful – Please do share it here so we can all benefit as well! :0

Yes, this was a big one for me, top of mind! So many useful things to talk solely about VPLEX alone! To share all of it would be a challenge! So let me break down some of the value points!

EMC has a great portal page around VPLEX which shares lots of useful information, collateral, white papers and more! (I’ll publish a nice one later with PowerLink things soon)

My good friend Bas Raayman collated all of the blog posts covering VPLEX from the general purpose Blogosphere and Media analysts too!  EMC VPLEX – Introduction and link overview

So to wrap up my own personal experience around the VPLEX from the sessions, prior knowledge and playing with the live VPLEX LAB – This is really cool – Live data access on both sides of a metro link = rockstar event! Check it out! Check it out! :)

After you pick yourself up after drooling all over VPLEX, it’s time to sign up for the Unisphere train, the Highlander of getting you to the Private Cloud “There can only be one… Private Cloud” and apparently, you’ll manage that with Unisphere!

You can listen to and watch Chad present a video on using Unisphere to get you kicked off on things! Certainly, if you’re at some of those non-youtube type locations, ask your local EMC to get you a demo :)      Though once you get yourself settled on a single interface for fun and managing off this rocking system, well.. you likely want it to do a little more!

This video actually takes you through some of the new features discussed at EMC World – Sub-Lun FAST, FAST Cache, and Primary block storage compression!

1) Sub-LUN FAST = automated tiering of storage (think "VMware DRS for Storage") – lowers cost of storage by between 30-50% on average.
2) FAST Cache = up to 2TB of low cost read/write cache – get more performance for the same $. In some cases, like VMware View – it can deliver same performance at 10x lower cost.
3) Primary block storage compression = save between 30- 50% on average on your storage consumption.

All sweet features which are pretty damn cool if you ask me! (Feel free to ask me.. we could discuss for hours on end ;))

Another cool feature which was announced at EMC World which most people don’t usually think about, but I’m gonna get you to start thinking about it now!

It’s easy to be efficient with EMC.

EMC® unified storage brings efficiency to a whole new level. We’ve even created a capacity calculator so you can configure efficiency results for yourself. You’ll discover that EMC requires 20% less raw capacity to achieve your unified storage needs. This translates to superior storage efficiency when compared to other unified storage arrays—even those utilizing their own documented best practices.

If we’re not more efficient, we’ll match the shortfall

If for some unlikely reason the capacity calculator does not demonstrate that EMC is 20% more efficient, we’ll match the shortfall with additional storage. That’s how confident we are.

The guarantee to end all guarantees

Storage efficiency is one of EMC’s fundamental strengths. Even though our competitors try to match it by altering their systems, turning off options, changing defaults or tweaking configurations—no amount of adjustments can counter the EMC unified storage advantage.

Here’s the nitty-gritty, for you nitty-gritty types

• The 20% guarantee is for EMC unified storage (file and block—at least 20% of each)
• It’s based on out-of-the-box best practices
• There’s no need to compromise availability to achieve efficiency
• There are no caveats on types of data you must use
• There’s no need to auto-delete snapshots to get results

This guarantee is based on standard out-of-the-box configurations. Let us show you how to configure your unified storage to get even more efficiency. Try our capacity calculator today.

So, hmm.. What does this mean exactly?! Well, if you read above, that gives you a break down of what the deal offers.  But like you, I want specific use-cases which I can relate to!  

This basically says, by using the EMC Unified Storage Calculator – Without enabling features (like thin provisioning, etc) you know.. ‘magic’ features, out-right the system will save you 20%, and once you start to enable other features you’ll see it grow above and beyond that – Sounds pretty compelling when it comes to the value of your solutions right?!

This is actually pretty damn sweet because it lets you use YOUR figures to determine what your space and layout concerns are, instead of generating off some spreadsheet with a bunch of jibber jabber and you go ‘eh, I still don’t believe it’  – But hey, don’t let me be the judge, load up the EMC Unified Storage Calculator and give it a try your self :)

Oh, did someone say “Hey, Wasn’t there some cool Ionix UIM 2.0 and Vblock things going on?!”

But we cannot discuss the rocking unified world of Vblock’s and vSphere without at the very least mentioning the Next Generation vCenter Plugins!

So, while there were a REAL LOT OF COOL THINGS both Announced and able to be seen at this years EMC World 2010 – You’re going to come away from it, whether you attended or missed the opportunity with some questions! So let me help you address these questions in tangible ways you can take it to your TC/SE and Sales Guy so you can make them work for YOU and your Organization.

Pick up the phone/email – Reach out to your EMC Guys and tell them you want to hear about:

• EMC VPLEX – And how it’s ease of use and whether the various use cases, Local, Metro and beyond will be a fit for your organization
• EMC Unisphere – Taking next generation unified up a notch and enabling your datacenter to grow and scale with the Cloud
• But seriously, the last one is really cool (Check it out, get a briefing with your Unified Storage guys as soon as you can because…)
• Oh, and don’t forget to ask about FAST Cache! I’ll be covering this fairly deeply soon in some blog posts, including direct use cases, and my deep technical considerations and assaults on engineering I already have in the works to make sure that it works as I architect and not as marketing tells me to :)
• EMC Unified Storage 20% Guarantee – This isn’t 90 pages of caveats, this is heads up, you will save period.  Ask your TC to help you save! ;)
• EMC Ionix UIM 2.0 – If you remember all of my coverage on UIM 1.0, 2.0 is actually gonna be the cats meow!
• EMC vCenter Plugins! – These are pretty sweet, and will help manage your experience!

I’m sure there are numerous other things I did not cover (You be the one to tell me!) but the ones above I found particularly cool – So go check them out, ask your TC or Sales Rep (Let me know if you do… I’m pushy… :) But I particularly want to hear your experiences and impressions!)

Enjoy the new world, and share share share! :)

So seriously, if you haven’t seen this post by Steve or Val, well.. until things are released I cannot say much more than them! But once I can, you’ll get the motherload of it!

What can I say, which has already been said though…

For those of you who manage NetApp filers, you likely are familiar with the Command Line (CLI) or FilerView.   I’d like to say “Welcome to the change to that experience” and that change comes in the form of an MMC snap-in which looks a bit like this!

Believe me, if I didn’t fear for my own disclosure, I’d say more!

One of my favorite bits of this, is the fact that I can manage multiple filers from this single interface – Add them in and they’re ready to go.  The same can be said for multiple members of a cluster.  What? It knows who its cluster pairs are and can tell you about issues? no that’s far too cool to be true.

There’s so much more… which I look forward to disclosing when this officially launches, but just do know that it is really-cool and will improve your management experience even more-so than you currently have today!

I will say nothing more on this! :)

Firstly, let me commend Beth Pariseau for this great article and interview with Fusion-io, including the deep-dive discussions with them!

Now that the formalities are out of the way… time to be not so nice ;)

I like the idea of the Fusion-io devices, I even mentioned them last June, so I’ll call it like it is!

What Fusion-io brings to the table is indeed a nice comprehensive solution to provide high-speed data access in a very small foot-print.  This is indeed a fact, I’m sure none of us will argue that they are indeed providing you to have very FAST storage operating in a distributed model, which works out perfectly in a one-off scenario in ways hard to even address!

The business challenges which Fusion-io solves is the difficulty of getting high-speed disk closer to very specific applications (such as grid-computing in ‘x’ number of boxes or OLTP) and it does a pretty good job of that, allowing me to insert their solution into my existing commodity servers!

However, for the one challenge this solution solves it still leaves all of the other pressing issues as this forces us into a distributed fashion, almost contradicting the consolidation efforts which Virtualization, FCoE and and Virtualized storage bring into the Datacenter.

So, I commend the effort, however the implementation of distribution not only increases my risk but it raises question of my scalability of this as a long-term viable implementation.   Here’s a top down list of challenges addressed and non-addressed with this implementation.

Infact, when you think about it, the Fusion-io introduction is a clear replacement for DAS in the current datacenter, but it lags so behind conventional (and even archaic) models of SAN implementations that it’d be hard-pressed for any Data Center or Enterprise Architect to use this in any extensive deployment with the lack of scalability, DR/BC sensitivity, HA application and short and long-term backup and archival.

On it’s own, it’s a challenge to see it last and take a significant portion of the Enterprise Storage market as a whole but as a niche player it is king.   With offerings like TMS – RAMSAN, the NetApp V-Series RAMSAN Bundle, and other SSD/EFD solutions premiered by the larger storage vendors this will not only continue to be an aggressive play in the future but will set a precedent of things to come.

It just goes to show, storage is dumb – It is how you use it and the intelligence into managing it which is the clear differentiator, and these differentiators will set the dogs apart from the wolves. (or lolcats if preferred)