It’s no secret; NetApp wants to sell you less storage than any other storage vendor and by forecasts from industry experts like IDC it is time we all begin enabling storage savings technologies throughout our datacenters. When NetApp was founded we unknowingly set out on this mission with the release of our first feature, the snapshot backup. It was a means for customers to take full backup copies of their data, yet each backup only consumed the amount of data that was unique to the data at the point in time the backup was created. The storage savings came from the sharing of blocks that were common between the production and backup data sets. Over the years we have continued to release new and enhanced storage savings capabilities for use in production, backup, DR, archival, and test & development data sets.
Suffice to say, storage efficiency is a driving theme in many of our technologies. With the release of Data ONTAP 8.0.1 we are extending our capabilities to include inline data compression and I’d like to spend a few minutes introducing you to our new offering. While it would be true to question the term industry leading as NetApp is one of the laggards in terms of adding support for compression, it would be rather myopic to discount our history of leading the industry with the vast number of storage savings technologies engineered for use with production workloads.
Once one considers the contents of this list it’s easy to understand why we lead the industry in reducing storage footprints in data centers through out the world:
Snapshot backups – logical full backups that only consume 4KB blocks that are unique between each backup
SnapMirror – Dedupe aware data replication that can be sent in a compressed form synchronously, a-synchronously, or in a semi-synchronous mode over fibre or IP.
RAID-DP – Provides data protection greater than RAID-10 with an overhead less equal to or less than RAID-5.
Thin provisioning – provisioning a logical unit of storage (FlexVol, LUN, or file) without pre-allocating the required storage.
Space reclamation – Ability to actually delete data that is marked as available for overwrite but still resides in the NTFS file systems of LUNs and VMDKs and on storage array. BTW – thin provisioning isn’t very compelling without space reclamation. It keeps thin, thin.
FlexClone – zero cost provisioning of FlexVols, Files, and LUNs (and sub-LUNs)
Data Deduplication – sharing physical 4KB blocks between dissimilar storage objects
Transparent Storage Cache Sharing – Dedupe aware cache that allows a 4KB block to be accessed by multiple external references (such as multiple VMs, DBs, etc.)
Platforms Supporting & Details of Data Compression
Let’s start with the basics; data compression is available in 8.0.1 with supported for the following arrays: