NetApp - Deeper in the Data Center

NetApp just announced its new storage system, the FAS6000, targeted for the data center. I have three reactions to this with the first being that NetApp has been in data centers for years. I've spoken to companies that have been using NetApp as their core storage system supporting mission-critical applications from the beginning of networking their storage. I also think that NetApp's software functionality, including its snapshots, RAID DP, FlexVol and FlexClone, provide compelling functionality that gives NetApp advantages over its leading competitors. However, the FAS6000 is NetApp's way of making a strong statement - they are going after the data center armed with a high performance, high capacity, feature-rich storage system that supports FC, iSCSI, CIFS and NFS.

The second reaction I have is that the FAS6000 not only supports a large amount of capacity (over 500 TB) but it optimizes it so effectively you get much more usable capacity than you do with most, if not all, other competitive products. Its snapshot technology creates logical pointers giving you protection copies that require no additional capacity. The NetApp FlexClone creates writeable snapshots that enable you to make additional logical copies of your volumes to be used for testing and data mining. This provides enormous savings over full volume copies that require the same amount of capacity as the primary volumes. In many cases, companies make two to six copies of primary data. With the NetApp FlexClone the cost savings are potentially staggering. Another major way that NetApp reduces capacity requirments is through the FlexVol thin provisioning option, which stores only actual data (and metadata) in volumes and not empty blocks. Traditional provisioning stores empty blocks and dedicates them to that volume whether you ever actually store real data on it or not. Since NetApp is so capacity efficient, it can truely enable customers to leverage the 500 TB optimally.

The third important factor is something that I think most people miss. The NetApp FAS6000 provides reliability, scalability and performance to meet data center needs and that is what they are emphasizing. But it also has the capacity, ease of use and intelligence to provide digital archiving and even disk-to-disk (D2D) backup in a single storage system. I am a big fan of using a single storage system to meet the needs of multiple applications and uses. Use the FAS6000 for your mission-critical database applications but also carve out volumes and file systems stored on 500 GB SATA drives for lower tiers. I think the FAS6000 provides an excellent balance of price/performance/scalabilty/reliability/intelligence (PPSRI) for all of the above. We need to stop stove-piping everything and get more out of our infrastructure. I think the FAS6000 is a big step towards this goal.