NetApp flexes all-flash array, flashes Flexpod revenues NetApp, the soon-to-be undisputed leading stand-alone storage company, has announced all-flash array guarantees nicely timed to resonate with the uncertainties now affecting EMC and Dell storage array products. It is said that, compared to enterprise database applications running on traditional non-flash, disk-based systems, …
ONATP - much to many people's chagrin - is actually something that can help NetApp survive all the cloudiness.
PHBs always want to put us in AWS, and our first problem with that is that we can't get the data their in a timely fashion. We have large volumes of NAS data that would take weeks to migrate in any traditional fashion - even using some one off software for replication - it would be a risky move at best, and then there is always the question of what happens when we find out we don't want to be at AWS, and maybe we want to do it ourselves again or move our data to some other provider where NetApp also has filers built in. Maybe they do the same sort of virtual filer model with Google or Azure in a few years.
Both of those problems are solved by this. A NetApp customer can effectively migrate in and out of AWS without too much risk or difficulty, just snapmirror to and fro - block or nas.
You can't say the same for just about any other storage vendor out there. We looked at this for a DR project, and it was still far less expensive to do it ourselves, but at some point I could see that changing.
The cost of buying a NetApp all-flash solution with 8 controllers clustered and large amounts of storage is just too high. Getting 1 terabit/sec or faster out of NetApp is just nearly impossible.
1) A proper redundant storage system doesn't require enterprise disks except at the hot teir
2) Most high performance storage requirements take VERY LITTLE disk.
3) NetApp depends almost entirely on REALLY SLOW SAS Expanders
4) NetApp's support for SMBv3 is REALLY slow.
Why in the world would anyone spend the money on one of these systems other than to just buy something that is out of date before it even ships and has tools that can't even delete volumes/LUNs once they're made without having to go to the command line since their own management tools lack the options for it.
What are you doing that requires 4 8080's and 1 terabit/sec of IO? (That's 100 10gigabit links) (25 ports per node. And more to the point where are you finding someone who isn't charging you enterprise scale pricing to deliver that kind of performance?
1. Yes you need enterprise disks... by that I mean they must be hot-swappable and mean time of failure > 3 years. If you don't need the performance you can buy big and slow SATA spindles but this is still enterprise disk. IT's not run down to the your local computer shop and pick up the 60 dollar special drive.
2. Clearly you've not met my DBA's... they consume disk in 5TB chunks.
3. Everybody's arrays that are not based on clustered nodes filled with pcie flash cards depend on sas links or sata links. FC drives are few and far between these days because they are much slower.
SAS-1: 3.0 Gbit/s, introduced in 2005
SAS-2: 6.0 Gbit/s, available since February 2009
SAS-3: 12.0 Gbit/s, available since March 2013
SAS-4: 22.5 Gbit/s, under development and expected in 2017
4. Ontap / Cdot have had smbv3 since ontap 8.2 smbfs is slow regardless and this is a limitation of the protocol and not the storage system.
https://library.netapp.com/ecmdocs/ECMP1196891/html/GUID-3E1361E4-4170-4992-85B2-FEA71C06645F.html
5. If your having trouble deleting stuff did you do everything in the right order? You deleted the protection policy and released the snapshot holds ? Then you deleted the destionation, and then the source... and the source wasn't in use as a source for other clones??? The GUI tools in cdot 8.3 work fine if you want to use them but you have to do things in the right order and understand the complicated system you built. IF you were just deleting one volume provisioned by itself without using any of the other tools it works... even for junior admins fresh out of computer essentials.
"If customers do not see the 3x performance improvement, NetApp will provide up to two days of professional optimization services at no cost to the customer."
So what's the news ? In the country I live NetApp desperately signed on Reseller Partners that wouldn't even know how to spell NetApp. After they completely screwed up the install (Netapp is complex) - NetApp Support was first dragged into the mess and finally - Professional Services had to come in to fix it.
This is the norm,but at least it gives PS something to do.
All they do now is streamline the process so customers don't have to endure Customer Success Services, before they have a working solution.
It's also much easier to give performance guarantees now that they litterally have to give away the stuff.
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