SAN Upgrade NetApp

[vmraider]

We currently have a NetApp 3210 and need to upgrade our storage.  We are trying to determine if we should upgrade our NetApp, and to what unit, or change vendors.  We are looking at Hitachi HUS, EMC VNX, HP PSeries, HP Lefthand and Compellent SANs.  We have fiber, and don't use NFS, and have no plans to move to NFS storage.  Performance is our major concern.  I appreciate any feedback you may have, especially from someone that has switched from NetApp to something else.

[ktawia]

Start by doing some analysis on your existing SAN. Look for your average and peak IOPS, storage processor load, and consumed space. Determine your future growth (3 year growth is a common benchmark), and any upcoming projects that would utilize the new SAN. Decide if you would need tiering such as higher performing SSD, FC, SAS or slower but more capacity SATA. Once you nail down the technicalities you have to consider cost, vendor support, existing relationships, and vendor reputation. You might start considering how you're going to get the data from the old SAN to the New SAN. Which vendor has the migration tools you would need, and stuff like that.

[mcowger]

^^^ Exactly.

All the arrays you have listed are solid choices, but to help narrow it down we'd need a ton more info.  Replication needs?  Availability needs?  Tiering needs?  etc.

[StorageGuyRay]

Why are you looking to swap out your NetApp?

Message was edited by: mcowger - Removed sales pitch.

[vmraider]

We have a pretty good idea of the performance characteristics and features we need.  We are pure VMware over fiber, we don't use SAN replication right now, and auto tiering isn't a huge concern for us now.  We are concerned with performance, growth, and stability, and are looking for a company that stands behind their product with outstanding support. What we are really looking for people who have worked with some of the SAN product lines I've listed, and their experience with one compared to the other based on performance, value and support.

[ktawia]

I manage shops with EMC, Netapp, and HP. I have not had support issues with any of them. The choice of vendor is usually constraint by the application vendor, price, and established relationships. We have Meditech application; Meditech said go with EMC and we did. We have GE PACS and GE bundled HP hardware with their software; the price was good so we accepted. We recently decided to do server consolidation/Virtualization and Netapp was impressive with their price and feature sets, so Netapp was selected. You see it's easy to point you in one direction or another but it comes down to your environment; your requirements, constraints, and other factors. You may want to work with a partner that can help you with the analysis and scoping. PBMIT; now ePlus helped us a lot. Some partners can get you special pricing as well. The other vendors you mentioned are well established and will do a good job with their support. It's just a matter of how they fit into your specific needs.

[Josh26]

It's really not useful to compare, say, NetApp performance vs EMC performance.

Both of them will have an array of options depending on budget. I'm sure you could approach either of them and say "sell me a model with SSD's in RAID 10" if you wanted.

You currently have a NetApp that you've had for a while. Now it needs an upgrade. I would find it hard to believe NetApp don't have anything new.

Disclaimer: I've never used a NetApp. I'm not sticking up for them.

[mikeyb79]

Well if you have fiber channel and you want to stick with it, then the HP Lefthand stuff is likely not what you want since it's iSCSI, and if you have the money to look at higher-end stuff, I'd skip the rest of the HP line (P2000, EVA) and go to 3PAR F-class if it's in budget.

I'd also somewhat shy away from NetApp in a pure fiber channel only environment, it's true value comes in multi-protocol or NFS environments. Block-on-file is good, but I think you'd get better bang for the buck out of a real FC SAN if that's what you want it for.

Largely it boils down to IOPS requirements and capacity requirements. If you know how much of both you need, the story writes itself. I'm a fan of Compellents granular "build for IOPS then add capacity" method, 3PAR delivers stunning performance with it's custom silicon, the VNX is built on proven updated Clariion tech with the option of licensing file if you want (VNX 5100 is block-only if it fits the bill), they all have tiering capabilities to some degree depending on configs/models, and they are all easy to manage.

Throw the IBM Storwize v7000 in there too, the SVC interface is very mature and it can sit in front of your existing NetApp as a gateway and teach it some new tricks while serving up Easy Tier'd storage (as long as you don't mind only having two tiers) and inline data compression.

You might not think you need tiering right now, but it's nice to have that in your back pocket if your workloads start to exceed your best laid plans!

I don't have experience with the Hitachi stuff so I can't comment on that.

[vmraider]

So far the information has been helpful and I'll look at the IBM SANs.  I most interested to hear from NetApp people, or people who have switched to/from NetApp. I would like to know if you're happy, or not, with your NetApp, and if so what NetApp model you recommend. Of course, if you're happy with your SAN vendor, and use one of those I've listed above, I would like to hear from you. I'm obviously not so impressed with NetApp that I'm willing to give them the automatic stamp of approval for the upgrade.  

[StorageGuyRay]

I have and know a lot of collegues I've talked to a VMUG groups that are running the 3200 series systems from NetApp without problems.  Both in SAN and NFS deployments.  There were some things I needed to check around VM alignment and make sure my jobs like replication (snapmirror) and deduplication were not stepping on the production performance - but with the help of my NetApp team I have it running like a top.  (The changes I talked about were very easy to monitor and change with the VSC integration with vCenter, and the NetApp System Manager and Unified Manager tools that are free to download from them.)

Looking around is great - but the performance and space savings is second to none with NetApp; no one compared.

I would recommend you get your NetApp (and VAR if you have one) to come in and do an assessment of your system - it might just be something as simple as a configuration change and you might not even need a new system.

Good luck.

[mcowger]

StorageGuyRay wrote:

Looking around is great - but the performance and space savings is second to none with NetApp; no one compared.

No one compares?  Come on.  Yes, NetApp is good.  But if no one compared, then no one besides NetApp would get bought.  If no one compared, how are they not 1st in marketshare?  Don't drink the koolaid that hard :smileyhappy:  NetApp has good kit, but there are plenty of competitors (many mentioned in this thread) that can beat them on performance (NetApp doesn't hold the record for SPC performance, for example, nor for NAS performance) and on capacity (others have far higher top capacities).

Again, NetApp is very solid gear for VMware environments, but to suggest no one else compares is just silly.

I would recommend you get your NetApp (and VAR if you have one) to come in and do an assessment of your system - it might just be something as simple as a configuration change and you might not even need a new system.

Excellent point - you'd be surprised at how just a few small changes can wring an extra year out of a system.

Good luck.