For someone who claims to have a good deal of technical knowledge regarding competing storage systems, this guy really didn't spend much time backing up some of the claims he made regarding Network Appliance:
This is where it will become more and more difficult for NetApps to succeed as, they have made nowhere near the investment in storage management that EMC has. NetApps offers quick-and-dirty connectivity. When the novelty of that wears off, businesses are really looking for more than connectivity. And NetApps has a tremendous amount of catching up to do with EMC here.
I'm not going to criticize the depth and quality of EMC's software offerings. They've spent a fortune developing them, and given the market share they have in the traditional storage system market, it appears that the work's paid off. However, what I don't understand is the dismissiveness this guy's shown towards the competitiveness of Network Appliance's software offerings, which can come on a box that costs much, much less, and doesn't require the use of an intermediary OS such as NT or Unix that wasn't optimized for storage (technically, EMC's Celerra does get rid of this weakness, but...I'll cover this later):
netapp.com
netapp.com
netapp.com
As of right now, until the connection medium of NAS becomes more reliable/predictable, it will continue to be used predominantly for file services. Databases and the like will still mandate the use of direct-attached storage and/or SANs.
This is why I'm a little skeptical of this guy's commentary. On one hand, he really does seem to know what he's talking about when discussing general trends in storage. On the other, he doesn't seem to have done his homework on Network Appliance. As the following pieces show, Netapp filers are also used by major corporations for the management of databases and mission-critical data:
biz.yahoo.com
netapp.com
Then there's all the talk surrounding the Celerra. There's already been a couple of well-written pieces going over how much more processing power and RAM a Celerra/Symmetrix combo uses to attain its performance, not to mention how the tests EMC used made sure that RAID protection, a feature that's nearly always used in real-life storage implementations, was turned off:
Message 14137557
boards.fool.com
boards.fool.com
So then there's EMC's other argument for justifying the high-cost Symmetrix when compared to an NAS system, which is it's scalability, i.e. consolidating your storage as much as possible to a single source; and I have to admit that the disk capacity of EMC's Symmetrix 8000 (19.1 TB) is significantly higher than Network Appliance's F840c (12 TB -set to come out in January); but when I asked a Network Appliance employee about this "weakness," I got an interesting response:
"Large storage companies like EMC brag about how BIG their capacities are. On a typical 9TB EMC box you actually have less than 4.5TB of useable data because of disk mirroring and TimeFinder BCV overhead. However, even of the storage that is available, you usually see it divided up among multiple hosts and multiple filesystems. The filesystem is the key. That's what you back up. Not the disks. Netapp Filers usually are deployed with much larger filesystems than our competitors because each file system is a point of administration.
So from a backup perspective, you need to look at how many filesystems you have to back up rather than the total GBs or TBs. It's easier to backup three or four 1TB filers than to backup a single 3-4TB EMC box. This more modular approach to storage capacities allows IT managers to scale their capacities ihn more manageable chunks and to provide backup capabilites in more manageable chunks. As backup solutions get bigger and faster and more standardized you'll see Netapp filer capacities grow."
With this kept in mind, the only benefit I can see from the larger cpacities of EMC's boxes is that they may be more managable in terms of space, and I'd agree that if you were to try a large-scale multi-terabyte implementation using 1.4 TB Netapp boxes, this could definitely be a problem; but with the F840c cutting down this ratio to nearly 3:2, I'm not sure how much this really matters, especially considering that Yahoo! was willing to do a 40 TB implementation using the 1.4 TB boxes.
Last but not least, there's the issue of the stand-alone Celerra SE. Given that, like Netapp filers, this thing uses a proprietary OS meant for storage management, I'm sure it's performance is commendable. However, even if the space/managability issue stemming from its 1.6 TB maximum capacity was to be ignored, it should be noted that such a device would require the use of six Data Movers, each of which contains a seperate processor. Thus six processors would be needed to manage 1.6 TB of capacity, as compared to only two processors for the 12 TB F840c. Feel free to guess who has the price/performance/capacity advantage.
When I initially wrote my report on the storage industry, a number of people were mistaken into thinking that I thought very little of EMC. That really isn't the case. EMC, like Network Appliance, realizes that the key to differentiation in the storage market relates to software rather than hardware, both for performance and managability (see emc.com for detailed information on EMC's software offerings). Given the lead it's amassed in terms of software functionality when compared with rivals such as IBM, Sun, and Dell, it should continue to gain significant market share in the SAS and SAN arenas.
However, IMO, assumuing that quality software is offered by the manufacturer of a given system (as NTAP does), NAS devices seem to be a superior choice for the majority of storage applications. A possible exception to this rule could be certain resouce-intensive apps in which a Unix/NT/Linux server connected to a storage system is making a request (i.e. a 2 mbps streaming video clip); however, for everything else, a quality NAS solution seems to offer significant advantages in terms of price/performance/capacity; and although I have to admit that EMC seems to have a very competitive solution in regards to performance and functionality with its Celerra SE, Network Appliance still appears to have a solid lead within this market in price and scalability/managability.
Eric
PS - DownSouth, I think the Celerra offers a similar level of platform transparency in terms of handling requests from different types of operating systems without segmenting a storage system. To quote an EMC fact sheet on the Celerra, "Celerra file servers can support Unix and Windows NT systems simultaneously. NFS and CIFS clients can access the same Symmetrix data files with the use of appropriate locking mechanisms." A diagram that seems to demonstrate this argument's also provided. You can download the data sheet at the following URL:
emc.com
Meanwhile, the data sheet for the F840 line can be found here:
netapp.com
And while I'm at it, I might as well throw in the links for the specification sheets for both products (the Celerra specs are for the non-standalone version, no info. could be found on the Celerra SE):
emc.com
netapp.com |
