SAN efficiency in your environment?

[wian]

There is a tech validation report out done by the Taneja Group that tested and analyzed FAS storage family SAN efficiency.

In this validation, they looked to find if the NetApp FAS family deliver unique efficiency, and does it deliver more than optimized bytes.  In the report, Taneja Group writes on requirements of Storage Foundation.  The combination of RAID-DP and WAFL set storage free from physical constraints and provide a foundation to keep storage optimized in any scenario.  There is an in-depth look into how RAID-DP and WAFL work in parallel to provide availability and reliability.  There is more within this report that looks into 4 dimensions of optimization – performance, capacity, access & resources.

Download this report and let us know if you what you think about the report. http://www.netapp.com/us/library/analyst-reports/ar-taneja-group-san-efficiency.html

What are you implementing in your environments to improve efficiency?

[lwei]

Hi Ian,

This is a good report and thanks for posting it.I think SAN management efficiency should be the 5th dimension.

Regards,

Wei

[jeremypage]

There are a few things that have helped us a lot (heavily virtualized environment, multiprotocol filer).

1. We've added PAM adapters to provide a major boost to our read IO - dropped our disk access latency way down
2. We use NFS as our data storage protocol for VMware. Being able to see VMDK files and manage them from a *nix box directly has a lot of benefits
3. Snapvaulting everything to an old filer has made restores painless, even if they are quite large.
4. Dedupe + thin provisioning on both the volume and VMDK levels has given us an incredible data density. We have ~160 TB of data on less then 100 TB of disk. Pretty amazing.