ONTAP Hardware

Netapp FAS vs EMC VNX

dejanliuit
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Hi.

This year we have to decide if we should keep our IBM N-series 6040 (Netapp 3140) stretch metrocluster, upgrade to Netapp 3200 (or rather the IBM alternative) or move to another manufacturer.

And from what I can see, EMC VNX is one of the most serious alternatives. My boss agrees and so we have aranged meeting with EMC to hear about their storage solution including ATMOS.

 

So, I would like to hear from you other guys what I should be aware about if we decide to go EMC VNX instead of keeping the Netapp/IBM track.

It could be implementation wise or things like "hidden" costs, ie volume based licensing.

I'm having trouble finding EMC manuals to see what can be done and what can't.

 

Our CIO has set up one big goal for the future user/filestorage: The storage has to cost at most as much as it would if you go and buy a new Netgear/DLink NAS (with mirrored disk) a year.

This would mean that $/MB for the system has to be as close as possible to this goal. Today the cost is at least tenfold more.

Unless we come close to that, we have a hard time convincing the Professors with their own fundings to store their files in our storage instead of running to nearest HW-store and buy a small NAS (or two) for their research team.

It's called "academic freedom" working at a university...

Initial investment might be a little higher, but the storage volume cost has to be a low as possible.

 

Today we have basic NFS/CIFS volumes, SATA for file and FC for Vmware/MSSQL/Exchange 2007.

No addon licenses except DFM/MPIO/SnapDrive. Blame the resellers for not being able to convince us why we needed Snap support for MSSQL/Exchange.

We didn't even have Operations manager for more than two years and has yet to implement it as it was recently purchased.

 

The Tiering on Netapp is a story for itself.

Until a year ago our system was IOPS saturated during daytime on the SATA disks and I had to rechedule backups to less frequent full backups (TSM NDMP backup) to avoid having 100% diskload 24/7.

So the obvious solution would be PAM and statistics show that it (512GB) would catch 50-80% of the reads.

But our FAS is fully configured with FC and cluster interconnect cards so there is no expansion slot left for PAM.

So to install PAM we have to upgrade the filer, with all the costs associated BEFORE getting in the PAM.

So the combination of lack of tiering and huge upgrade steps makes this a very expensive story.

 

What realy buggs me is that we have a few TB fibrechannel storage available that could be used for tiering.

And a lot of the VM images data would be able to go down to SATA from FC.

 

EMC does it, HP (3Par) does it, Dell Compellent does it, Hitachi does it ...

But Netapp doesn't implement it. Despite having a excellent WAFL that with a "few" modifications it should be able to implement it even years ago.

 

Things we require are

* Quotas

* Active Directory security groups support (NTFS security style)

* Automatic failover to remote storage mirror, ie during unscheduled powerfailure (we seem to have at least one a year on average).

 

Things we are going to require soon due to amount of data

* Remote disaser recovery site, sync or async replication.

 

Things that would be very usefull

* Multi-domain support (multiple AD/Kerberos domains)

* deduplication

* compression

* tiering (of any kind)

 

So I've tried to set up a number of good/bad things I know and what I've seen so far.

What I like with Netapp/Ontap

* WALF with its possibilities and being very dynamic

* You can choose security style (UNIX/NTFS/Mixed) which is good as we are a mixed UNIX/Windows site.

 

Things I dislike with Netapp/Ontap/IBM

* No tiering (read my comment below)

* Large (read: expensive) upgrade steps for ie. memory or CPU upgrade in controllers

* Licenses bound to the controller-size and has essentialy to be repurchased during upgrade (this I'm told by the IBM reseller)

* You can't revert a disk-add operation to a aggregate

* I feel a great dicomfort when switching the cluster as you first shut down the service to TRY to bring it up on the other node, never being sure it will work.

* Crazy pricing policy by IBM (don't ask)

* A strong feeling of being a IBM N-series customer we are essentialy a second rate Netapp user.

 

Things I like so far with VNX from what I can see

* Does most, if not everything our that FAS does and more.

* Much better Vmware integration, compared to the Netapp Vmware plugin that I tried for a couple times and then droped it.

* FAST Tiering

* Much easier smaller upgrades of CPU/memory with Blades

 

I have no idea regarding negative sides, but being an EMC customer earlier I know they can be expensive, especially after 3 years.

That might counter our goal of keeping the storage costs down.

 

I essentialy like Netapp/Ontap/FAS, but there is a lot of things (in my view) talking against it right now with Ontap loosing its technological edge.

Yes, we are listening to EMC/HP/Dell and others to hear what they have to say.

 

I hope I didn't rant too much.

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