EMC and other companies rarely want to compare apple-to-apple with NTAP because they know the results will not be flattering. NTAP really does have the best technology - the best use of software on a given hardware platform.
Until a couple of years ago, NTAP was the ONLY NFS server with RAID turned "on". I believe that is still the case. NTAP does not have the ability to turn RAID "off". That is because RAID is an integral feature of the WAFL file system.
What EMC and others are showing to the astute is just how disruptive NTAP's filers really are. Remember, the disruptive nature of NTAP's filers lie in the fact that the Unix and Windows file systems are dis-integrated. There is NO Unix or Windows file system on the NTAP filers. There is only WAFL, which conforms to the I/O protocols of NFS (Unix) and CIFS (Windows) but is a superior file system giving ease of use, throughput, security, reliability, cross-protocol security and total cost of ownership advantages that simply cannot be approached using the native file systems.
These benchmarks will impress investors, EMC customers, and EMC prospects where NTAP is not competing. These results will not impress an objective decision maker.
By the way, let me explain RAID a bit differently. The data in a RAID 4 or RAID 5 system is not "duplicated". The data bits (1's and 0's) are spread across an array of disk drives, adding a parity bit. So if one drive in a RAID array fails, the contents of that drive can be easily reconstructed, without service interruption, by reconstructing the lost "bits" of data using the parity agorithm. Simply, using "odd parity", if the "1" bits in the remaining drives add up to an even number, then the bit lost on the failed drive is a "1", making that total of 1's odd. If the "1" bits in the remaing drives add up to an odd number, then the lost bit is a "0". |
