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The Register wrote a damning piece about NetApp a few days ago. I felt it was irresponsible because this is akin to kicking a man when he’s down. It is easy to do that. The writer is clearly missing the forest for the trees. He was targeting NetApp’s Clustered Data ONTAP (cDOT) and missing the entire philosophy of NetApp’s mission and vision in Data Fabric.

I have always been a strong believer that you must treat Data like water. Just like what Jeff Goldblum famously quoted in Jurassic Park, “Life finds a way“, data as it moves through its lifecycle, will find its way into the cloud and back.

And every storage vendor today has a cloud story to tell. It is exciting to listen to everyone sharing their cloud story. Cloud makes sense when it addresses different workloads such as the sharing of folders across multiple devices, backup and archiving data to the cloud, tiering to the cloud, and the different cloud service models of IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and XaaS.

But if we take a look at all these cloud offerings and also computing platforms in our own server room or in the data center, the on-premise infrastructure, the data landscape is NOT coherent. The data flow is not in harmony, and it is not congruent. If we imagine data as water, there is hindrance of data movement as it moves from one stage to another in the data lifecycle. This applies to almost every storage, system or cloud vendor today.

Even worse, organizations lose the control of the data along the way. When data moves out of an on-premise data center to the cloud, IT is almost passing off a large amount of control of their data to the cloud service provider.

Remember the Nirvanix story about 2 years ago? When Nirvanix went belly up, customers of theirs went to a panic mode. They were asked to remove their data within 2 weeks! One customer of Nirvanix had 20PB stored in the Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network. How the F do you think that customer would have felt in that whole Nirvanix fiasco?

This is exactly what I mean about losing control of data.

As Cloud Computing gains a much deeper foothold into IT, the data landscape does not change. The data lifecycle does not change. Data still moves from an active stage to a passive stage, and perhaps back to the active stage when needed. Along with the data movement though its lifecycle, the value of the data changes as well.

That is what the NetApp Data Fabric can do for data in any organizations. A single data management architecture that is able to have data transcend from on-premise data platforms on NetApp (or 3rd party platforms using NetApp FlexArray) to the data platforms on hybrid clouds in cloud service providers and on to the data platforms of hyperscalers, and back. All these data movement is secure, and more importantly, allows organizations to maintain control of their data, wherever it may be residing.

I have put my views of NetApp Data Fabric in the picture below (pardon my Powerpoint skills).

The underpinnings and foundation of the Data Fabric is NetApp Clustered Data ONTAP. And with the latest release of cDOT 8.3.1, the technology has reached an important milestone to realize the single data landscape architecture.

Furthermore, I cannot recall at this moment of any storage vendor or cloud service provider adopting a philosophy like Data Fabric, which means that their customers would likely encounter hindrance of data as it moves through different premises or clouds. Just like water trapped in a watering hole, eventually it will dry up or become useless.

I am not trying deride the writer of the article, but instead of sensationalizing the NetApp story, perhaps it would be better to have a deeper understanding of where NetApp is now and where they are going. From the outside, they looked to be going through a rough patch right now, but as an ex-employee, NetApp has always been my little engine that could.

The intend of my response in this blog is really to help everyone open up their eyes because it is all about a single and secure data architecture. Clustered Data ONTAP happens to be the technology that makes this happens.

Remember … Data will find its way. There is no stopping that.

Is there another storage platform as feature rich as NetApp FAS?

I think it is fair to say that NetApp FAS running Clustered Data ONTAP is a very feature rich platform – the move to the clustered version of ONTAP has brought many next-generation features including Scale-out and Non-disruptive Operations.

As a benchmark let’s compare FAS to EMC’s solutions – I fully appreciate that EMC has taken a best of breed approach, but my feeling is that for most non-enterprise customers this is not a sustainable strategy – customers want simplicity and ease of use, and you are not going to get that by deploying four different storage platforms to meet your needs.

I have chosen EMC because they are the overall market share leader and they have the broadest set of storage products available – so let’s compare FAS with VNX, VPLEX, XtremIO, Isilon and Data Domain:

NetApp FAS supports All-Disk, Hybrid Flash and All-Flash data stores - that meet the needs of any kind of application workload

The VNX is a very good All-Disk and Hybrid Flash array and XtremIO is a very good All-Flash array, but you need two completely different products to provide the functionality.

NetApp FAS eliminates silos and provides seamless scalability - to address Server Virtualisation, Virtual Desktop, Database and File storage needs in one scale-up and scale-out solution, that can start small and grow large

VNX is optimal for general Server Virtualisation and Databases and XtremIO excels when it comes to large scale Virtual Desktop and ultra-high performance database requirements. The VNX scales-up, but not out, and XtremIO scales-out, but not up.

NetApp FAS has fully unified SAN and NAS storage - to enable consistent management across all protocols and therefore flexibility in their use

VNX has a separate NAS OS which requires its own management (but it is integrated into a single UI along with SAN), XtremIO is SAN only and Isilon is NAS only.

NetApp FAS provides many storage efficiency technologies - including De-duplication, Inline Zero Write Elimination, Compression, Thin-Provisioning, Zero-cost Cloning and High-performance Double Disk Protection

XtremIO is excellent at all of these (just lacks the Double Disk Protection which I believe it will get shortly), neither VNX or Isilon are anywhere near as strong.

NetApp FAS has Flash optimised writes - with a SSD warranty that has no restrictions on the number of drive writes

As expected XtremIO excels whereas VNX and Isilon are not optimised.

NetApp FAS provides 24×7 continuous availability - including proven enterprise RAS, Non-disruptive Operations, and Metrocluster Site Protection

Neither VNX or XtremIO provide the ability to perform Non-Disruptive Operations like FAS. Introducing VPLEX does provide these capabilities along with excellent Metrocluster site protection.

NetApp FAS has integrated data protection - with near instant creation of snapshot based backups and automated offsite replication

Neither the VNX or XtremIO have these capabilities, to a lesser extent Isilon comes close, but it is limited to the workloads it supports (i.e. it cannot be used for Server or Desktop Virtualisation). EMC’s data protection solutions are typically built using their Data Domain De-duplication appliances and conventional backup software (interestingly they have started to integrate Data Domain directly with the replication engine within the new VMAX3 – no doubt a sign of things to come).

NetApp FAS is Public Cloud integrated - to support hybrid Disaster Recovery and Cloud Bursting

Currently there is no VNX equivalent of Cloud ONTAP for AWS, but this is expected sometime in 2015.

NetApp FAS is designed for VMware vSphere - with support for Virtual Volumes, VAAI, Site Recovery Manager and vCenter management

As expected VNX and XtremIO have support for all the relevant integrations with vSphere. Where FAS has an advantage is that NetApp have already announced support for Virtual Volumes so existing hardware will be able to take advantage of Virtual Volumes – not sure we will be able to say the same about VNX.

NetApp FAS is designed for VMware Horizon View - with support for high-performance hardware accelerated Full Clones (using VAAI) and Linked Clones (using VCAI), and up to 160,000 IOPS at 80% Writes per array

As expected for large scale Virtual Desktop projects XtremIO excels and the only area where it is lacking is that it doesn’t support VCAI as it requires NFS.

NetApp FAS is designed for Microsoft Hyper-V - with support for SMB 3.0 Continuous Availability Shares and Offloaded Data Transfer (ODX)

VNX has good support, whereas XtremIO lacks support for both SMB 3.0 and ODX.

I am confident that you could substitute EMC with any other storage vendor and you would end up with the same result – no single storage platform is anywhere near as feature rich as FAS.

So is FAS and Clustered Data ONTAP perfect?Absolutely not, there are undoubtedly areas whereby the traditional SAN arrays still have advantages (mostly around active/active controller architectures and metrocluster capabilities).

So what else would I like to see from FAS?

• Sharing of drives across controllers – we are already starting to see this with the new drive and Flash Pools partitioning features
• Detaching of the drives from the controllers – so that the failure of an HA pair within a cluster does not result in downtime
• MetroCluster
  • Granular fail over - so volumes or even Virtual Volumes can be “moved” between sites
  • IP replication - either using FCIP bridges or native IP connectivity
  • Active/Active - so volumes/LUNs can be active on both sides of the cluster
• Erasure coding – to eliminate idle spares and enable rapid drive rebuilds
• Encryption – provided by the controllers rather than drives
• Advanced QoS – to enable setting of Service Level Objectives rather than just limits
• Integrated file archiving – to move older files to secondary storage or the cloud

Conclusion

I truly believe that there is no single storage platform that comes close to matching the range of capabilities of a NetApp FAS, but what do you think?

Do you work for a vendor or are you an end-user of a competitive storage platform? If you are let me know what you think – what are the downsides of the FAS architecture from your point of view?

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What is our primary use case?

What is most valuable?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and support?

How would you rate customer service and support?

How was the initial setup?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

What other advice do I have?

What is most valuable?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and support?

How would you rate customer service and support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

What other advice do I have?

What is most valuable?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

How are customer service and support?

How would you rate customer service and support?

What was our ROI?

What other advice do I have?

What is our primary use case?

How has it helped my organization?

What is most valuable?

What needs improvement?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

What other advice do I have?