Author: Dimitris

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NetApp posts SPC-1 Top Ten Performance results for its high end systems – Tier 1 meets high functionality and high performance

It’s been a while since our last SPC-1 benchmark submission with high-end systems in 2012. Since then we launched all new systems, and went from ONTAP 8.1 to ONTAP 8.3, big jumps in both hardware and software.

In 2012 we posted an SPC-1 result with a 6-node FAS6240 cluster  – not our biggest system at the time but we felt it was more representative of a realistic solution and used a hybrid configuration (spinning disks boosted by flash caching technology). It still got the best overall balance of low latency (Average Response Time or ART in SPC-1 parlance, to be used from now on), high SPC-1 IOPS, price, scalability, data resiliency and functionality compared to all other spinning disk systems at the time.

Today (April 22, 2015) we published SPC-1 results with an 8-node all-flash high-end FAS8080 cluster to illustrate the performance of the largest current NetApp FAS systems in this industry-standard benchmark.

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Marketing fun: NetApp industry first of up to 13 million IOPS in a single rack

I’m seeing some really “out there” marketing lately, every vendor (including us) trying to find an angle that sounds exciting while not being an outright lie (most of the time).

A competitor recently claimed an industry first of up to 1.7 million (undefined type) IOPS in a single rack.

The number (which admittedly sounds solid), got me thinking. Was the “industry first” that nobody else did up to 1.7 million IOPS in a single rack?

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NetApp Posts Top Ten SPC-1 Price-Performance Results for the new EF560 All-Flash Array

<edit: updated with the changes in the SPC-1 price/performance lineup as of 3/27/2015, fixed some typos>

I’m happy to announce that today we announced the new, third-gen EF560 all-flash array, and also posted SPC-1 results showing the impressive performance it is capable of in this extremely difficult benchmark.

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When competitors try too hard and miss the point – part two

This will be another FUD-busting post in the two-part series (first part here).

It’s interesting how some competitors, in their quest to beat us at any cost, set aside all common sense.

Recently, an Oracle blogger attempted to understand a document NetApp originally wrote in the 90’s (and which we haven’t really updated since, which is admittedly our bad) that explains how WAFL, the block layout engine of Data ONTAP (the storage OS on the FAS platform) works at a high level.

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When competitors try too hard and miss the point

(edit: fixed the images)

After a long hiatus, we return to our regularly scheduled programming with a 2-part series that will address some wild claims Oracle has been making recently.

I’m pleased to introduce Jeffrey Steiner, ex-Oracle employee and all-around DB performance wizard. He helps some of our largest customers with designing high performance solutions for Oracle DBs:

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Is convenience devaluing products? Does quality suffer because of it?

Kind of a long hiatus posting (far too busy working on cool stuff) and for you looking for a deep technical post this may not be it… but here goes anyway since the content may also apply to my more usual subjects.

Recently I decided to discard my Luddite membership card and join the hordes of people using network-based services for music.

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EMC’s VNX2 forklift: The importance of hardware re-use, slowing down obsolescence, and maximizing your investment

It was with interest that I watched the launch of EMC’s VNX refresh. The updated boxes got some long-awaited features, EMC talked a lot about how some pretty severe single-threaded bottlenecks were removed, more CPU and memory was put in, and there was much rejoicing.

Not really trying to pick on the new boxes (that will be in a future post, relax :)), but what I thought was interesting was that the code that makes most of the new features a possibility cannot be loaded on current-gen VNX boxes (not even the biggest, the 7500, which has plenty of CPU and RAM juice even compared to the next gen boxes).

Software-defined storage indeed.

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How to decipher EMC’s new VNX pre-announcement and look behind the marketing.

It was with interest that I watched some of EMC’s announcements during EMC World. Partly due to competitor awareness, and partly due to being an irrepressible nerd, hoping for something really cool.

BTW: Thanks to Mark Kulacz for assisting with the proof points. Mark, as much as it pains me to admit so, is quite possibly an even bigger nerd than I am.

So… EMC did deliver something. A demo of the possible successor to VNX (VNX2?), unavailable as of this writing (indeed, a lot of fuss was made about it being lab only etc).

Continue reading “How to decipher EMC’s new VNX pre-announcement and look behind the marketing.”

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More EMC VNX caveats

Lately, when competing with VNX, I see EMC using several points to prove they’re superior (or at least not deficient).

I’d already written this article a while back, and today I want to explore a few aspects in more depth since my BS pain threshold is getting pretty low. The topics discussed:

  1. VNX space efficiency
  2. LUNs can be served by either controller for “load balancing”
  3. Claims that autotiering helps most workloads
  4. Claims that storage pools are easier
  5. Thin provisioning performance (this one’s interesting)
  6. The new VNX snapshots

References to actual EMC documentation will be used. Otherwise I’d also be no better than a marketing droid.

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Beware of benchmarking storage that does inline compression

In this post I will examine the effects of benchmarking highly compressible data and why that’s potentially a bad idea.

Compression is not a new storage feature. Of the large storage vendors, at a minimum HPE, NetApp, EMC and IBM can do it (depending on the array). <EDIT (thanks to Matt Davis for reminding me): Some arrays also do zero detection and will not write zeroes to disk – think of it as a specialized form of compression that ONLY works on zeroes>

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Are some flash storage vendors optimizing too heavily for short-lived NAND flash?

I really resisted using the “flash in the pan” phrase in the title… first, because the term is overused and second, because I don’t believe solid state is of limited value. On the contrary.

However, I am noticing an interesting trend among some newcomers in the array business, desperate to find a flash niche to compete in:

Writing their storage OS around very specific NAND flash technologies. Almost as bad as writing an entire storage OS to support a single hypervisor technology, but that’s a story for another day.

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Filesystem and OS benchmark extravaganza: Software makes a huge difference

I’ve published benchmarks of various OSes and filesystems in the past, but this time I thought I’d try a slightly different approach.

For the regular readers of my articles, I think there is something in here for you. The executive summary is this:

Software is what makes hardware sing. 

All too frequently I see people looking at various systems and focus on what CPU each box has, how many GHz, cores etc, how much memory. They will try to compare systems by putting the specs on a spreadsheet.

OK – let’s see how well that approach works.

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Are you doing a disservice to your company with RFPs?

Whether we like it or not, RFPs (Request For Proposal) are a fact of life for vendors.

It usually works like this: A customer has a legitimate need for something. They decide (for whatever reason) to get bids from different vendors. They then craft an RFP document that is either:

  1. Carefully written, with the best intentions, so that they get the most detailed proposal possible given their requirements, or
  2. Carefully tailored by them and the help of their preferred vendor to box out the other vendors.

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