The Virtual Storage Guy

5 Reasons to Upgrade to Data Ontap 8.0.1

Last week while hosting our Virtualization Field Readiness Summit I spent some time with Dr. Desktop (aka Chris Gebhardt) and while educating me on advancements in our technologies related to desktop virtualization he shared a few of the enhancements in Data Ontap 8.0.1 that were so exciting I thought I’d share.

Reason Number 1 - 64 Bit Aggregates

64 bit aggregates allow customer to extend the size of their storage pools (or aggregates) by raising the maximum capacity from 16 TB (with Data Ontap 7.x) to 100TB. For those of you unfamiliar with NetApp technology, an Aggregate is a collection of physical disks that have been protected in RAID-DP RAID groups. The aggregate is NetApp’s means to logically separate the capacity and performance IOPs from a physical disk drive and serve it via a resource pool to a number of datasets. This model allows us to leverage the physical resources to a higher level of utilization than what one can accomplish with traditional RAID technologies.

With 64 bit aggregates and RAID-DP, customers extend their dataset size and capabilities without compromising the protection of their data.

Reason Number 2 - NetApp DataMotion for FC, FCoE, & iSCSI LUNs

Is NetApp Missing from your Datacenter?

On behalf of NetApp, I’m writing to you with a simple proposition:

For your next storage purchase, you should consider NetApp.

Things move at a fast, if not exponential pace in the data center. The advent of virtual infrastructures and cloud computing has introduced a new set of requirements that redefined the value proposition of storage arrays within a cloud infrastructure stack.

The storage array that you ultimately select is responsible for maintaining most (if not all) of your organization’s intellectual property. This means that the success of your organization is dependent on the infrastructure that supports it and is tied to you ability to affect change in the quality of the storage you introduce.

Gone are the days when a shared storage platform simply provided high performance and data availability for a select set of business critical applications. Today, arrays MUST serve all of the data in the data center with greater than five (5) 9’s of availability while bringing to bear key enabling technologies such as: storage efficiency, data mobility, disaster resilience, continuous data protection, security and many, many more. Oh, did I mention that all this is predicated on a solution that must be repeatable, operationally consistent, non-disruptive, easy to manage, and able to grow with you and your business without adding unnecessary burdens to the adoption process?

What I have just articulated are array-specific requirements I have seen across the board – whether you are a small to medium business, a medium to lower-end enterprise, or a full on enterprise class customer. In every customer engagement that I have, these are always topics of conversation, and to you my fellow reader, I can only hope that many of these requirements are ringing true in your mind.

Now, if you do have a traditional storage array, then your existing vendor is likely a large and successful company with a long history of delivering big-iron solutions. Ideally, they have been there for you through the time of mainframes and open system through today’s emerging virtualization technologies, but you should ask yourself: “are they still offering a multitude of platforms under one banner, each offering a unique a specially tailored feature-set to address some portion of you virtual datacenter needs and ultimately your organization’s requirements?”

If you answered “no”, then let me thank you for being a NetApp customer ☺, otherwise, I encourage you to read on.

If you are open to new possibilities to extend your datacenter capabilities, especially for virtualization initiatives, or haven’t taken a closer look at NetApp’s technologies recently, then I’d like to offer you some compelling reasons as to why you should.

Introducing Data Compression in ONTAP 8.0.1

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:

IDC says your data will grow and grow and grow...

Did you get a chance to read “The Digital Universe Decade - Are You Ready?” published by IDC (May 2010)? This report is a follow-up from the 2007 report titled, “The Expanding Digital Universe”. I ask this question as I'm surprised by the number of individuals who are unaware of its existence. In fact I don’t believe I met more than a dozen individuals at VMworld (US & Europe) or Insight (US & Europe) who had read either of these reports.

I should admit, that this report kind of flew under my radar as well. I owe thanks to The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe podcast (which is one of my favorites and a recommendation to you) for covering this report in episode 251.

In short the Digital Universe is defined as all of the data that exists today and these reports attempt to measure the capacity of data in existence today while also providing a forecast for future growth. I'd suggest that these reports are fantastic reads and wanted to share with you a bit in order to prepare you for the amount of data storage capacity your infrastructure will be required to address.

Buckle up, it's gonna get wild!

Zettabyte Me!

The 2007 report estimated that the digital universe, all of the known data in the world, totaled 161 exabytes (or 161,000 petabytes). In addition, this report forecasted a growth of the digital universe to 988 exabytes by 2010.

Announcing FlexPod for VMware from Cisco & NetApp

Today we held our ‘Future Ready’ event, which was the largest product launch in the history of NetApp. This launch was so extensive it included updates to three quarters of our portfolio and introduced a slew of net new features, products, and solutions.

Am I excited? That’s an understatement!

Current global economic conditions are reshaping business and success is becoming increasingly dependent on the ability of IT to transition to a flexible and efficient shared IT infrastructure that enables IT and accelerate business. NetApp is innovating to meet these challenges and id like to highlight just a few of the key announcements included in today's launch!

• High End FAS & vSeries 6200 platforms: Defining high-end performance


• Mid Range FAS & vSeries 3200 platforms: Delivering outstanding value and efficiency
• New disk drives & shelves: Increasing efficiency and performance via a 2.5” form factor and the introduction of SSD
• Data ONTAP 8.0.1: Includes delivers support for VAAI & inline data compression (to name just a few highlights)


• Unified Connect 10 GbE CNAs: Providing 'one wire' for all I/O and workloads
• OnCommand Management: Software for managing shared IT Infrastructures


• FlexPod for VMware: Introduces a new enterprise data center solution that is pre-sized and integrates NetApp, Cisco, and VMware technologies to help customers deploy shared IT infrastructures more efficiently and effectively

There’s so much content to dig into and share that you should expect a significant number of posts from many at NetApp over the next few days. Per my norm, I will share with you details on a number of these technologies specifically as the pertain to virtual and cloud infrastructures starting with FlexPod.

Cisco and NetApp Announce FlexPod for VMware

As a part of Today’s Future Ready Launch we announced FlexPod for VMware, a infrastructure designed to enhance and accelerate the adoption of private and public cloud. FlexPod was developed in partnership with Cisco, NetApp and VMware and were modeled after the infrastructures delivering services for the world’s largest cloud service providers.

Myth Busting: Storage Guarantees - Part II

I hope many of you read my recent post: Myth Busting: Storage Guarantees wherein I raised questions around the storage savings guarantee from EMC. The basic question is how can they deliver greater storage savings with fewer technical capabilities and use cases than what is available from NetApp. I believe this is a fair question and was hoping for some information sharing.

Now I don't expect most to be storage experts and to help raise the level of understanding I created the following chart.

Simply put, when one understands the technologies, their capabilities, and the parameters where each technology can be enabled; such a claim doesn’t appear to hold water.

As I have in the past, I extended an invitation to EMC to review the chart and to educate the public as to how the storage savings in their guarantee can be accomplished.

Unfortunately the only response (or compliment) the post received was from Chuck Hollis who shared a less than complimentary comment of "chartsmithing" in reference to the accuracy of the contents in the chart.

Honestly, I'm a bit concerned that the technical folks at EMC may have been asked to not engage in technical discussions. It appears as they want to communicate a message ofadvancedstorage technologies are the fundamentally the same from vendor to vendor, yet when asked to elaborate they becomedeafly silent. In my opinion, this behavior is like saying another hypervisor on the market today has the same capabilities as VMware ESXi, and one shouldn’t be concerned with the differences.

As for the lack of dialog, the silence speaks volumes…

The Lone Standout

To my surprise I recently learned of and read the post “Lies, Damn Lies, and Marketing…” from Richard Anderson, an engineer at EMC.

I commend Richard for his efforts and sharing his insight, and his level of professional courtesy. The post begins by verifying the content of the chart...

Myth Busting: Storage Guarantees

Way back at VMworld 2008 NetApp announced our 50% storage savings guarantee for virtual data centers. This guarantee basically stated that running VMware on NetApp would reduce one’s storage requirements by half and if we did not, the remaining storage was on us.

At the time these storage savings were powered by our block-level data deduplication and thin provisioning of LUNs and volumes and was specifically targeted for VMware and later Hyper-V deployments.

As we approach the two year anniversary of the guarantee I'd like to share that we have added a number of new technical innovations around storage savings technologies such as deduplicated and compressed replication, dedupe-aware cache, storage reclamation of deleted data trapped within guest file systems (i.e. NTFS formatted LUNs and VMDKs), etc.

I can also share that we have tens of thousands of customers running their clouds on NetApp and the average installation achieves 50%-70% storage savings with virtual servers and 90%+ with virtual desktops.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

We were very flattered in 2009 when VMware established a 50% guarantee. While not a storage guarantee per se; I’m pretty sure that VMware's program was a smashing success (and probably didn't require any guarantee).

Data Compression, Deduplication, & Single Instance Storage

Today I wrapped up several weeks of travel which included the Charlotte VMUG conference, NetApp's Foresight engineering event, and a number of customer and technical partner meetings. During these travels a small number of individuals would use the term data deduplication as any technology which reduces the amount of storage capacity required to store a data object (file, LUN, VM, etc...)

When this situation arose I would asked these individuals to share their understanding of data deduplicaiton. It became clear that they did not have a solid understanding of the differences between data compression, deduplication, and single instance storage, nor the benefits and considerations of each technology.

I guess one could summarize by saying these technologies are simply different means to achieve the same goal, the reduction of the storage footprint. However, this oversimplified answer does not provide any information which assists a data center architect in determining where each technology delivers the best benefit. This last point, is the goal of this post.

As we proceed I will refer to my trusty ruler as a means to visibly 'measure' storage savings obtained with each of these technologies.