Re: Thoughts on Netapp Fas2050 and Emc ns20
- From: Ray Breen <deathmatchuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2008 07:58:15 -0800 (PST)
On Jan 20, 2:30 am, "bit.p...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
<bit.p...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jan 4, 10:06 am, Ray Breen <deathmatc...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Guys,
I am going through the process of business continuity and am looking
at using one of our remote sites as a hot site from a data and
services point of view. This is going to be using vmware / vmotion to
take care of the servers, and some site to site replication for the
data,
The I.T department for the company consists of 3 guys, who have to do
everything from 1st line support to 3rd/4th so simplicity and
reliability of the equipment is a given.
Having narrowed down to two suppliers, namelynetappandEmc.Netapp
have recommended the Fas2050 andEMCthe ns20. Both are nas products
with the capability of having fibre channel connectivity.
I am going to virtualise around 14 servers in total, with there being
2 exchange, 2 sql and various other supporting servers. The file is
going to be handled by the nas boxes.
My thoughts on the two nas systems based upon various demonstrations,
online research is based below.
EmcVs Net App Comparison
------Inteface / Ease of Use
Aim : Ease of management for the I.T Team.
Emcrequires two completely separate interfaces to the san and iscsi/
nas storage. This complicates the management and ongoing support. Net
only has one unified interface.
Netappinterface is easier to use.
NetAppis the clear winner
------General Nas features
Aim: Most productive features
Netapphave been in the nas industry for many years, compared toEMC
who have only recently moved into this segment.
AllNetappfeatures propagate down from the highest level to the
lowest.EMChave several differentiating tiers in their product line,
so so some features are not available on the lower equipment, that is
on the higher.
Netappis the winner
------SnapShot Technology
Aim : Ability to take snapshots on a regular basis with no/small
performance hit.
Netappcaters for upto 255 snapshots.EMConly 96 which for my needs
is fine.
WithNetappcan do something like the following :
D.R Snapshot - runs every 5 minutes, and keeps a maximum of 12 (an
hours worth of copies).
File recovery Snapshot - Another schedule which backs up the same
data, but does it every 4 hours and keeps a maximum of 15 copies (3
taken every 4 days, every working day, so will have 5 working days)
Daily/Weekend backup Snapshot - Which backs up the same data but runs
only once a night with a maximum of 30 copies (will simulate our
nightly/weekly/monthly data).
This will greatly reduce our tape storage/transportation costs, saving
1000's a year.
Netappis the clear winner
------Cost / Performance
Aim : Keep costs low while satisfying the criteria for Business
Continuity
No definitive costs as of yet, but it is looking likely thatnetapp
are going to undercutemc.
Raid-DP, Thin provisioning, De-Duplication, potentially far less disk
wastage/segregration compared toemc'straditional lun approach
------Pedigree / reliability in the industry
Emcare second to none in their quality control and support. Very
little hardware failures ever leave their factory.
------Fragmentation Concerns
Netapp'sfile system has benefits but also potential downsides with
the way that it writes data. General recommendations are that over
time, and especially if the aggregate is near capacity, performance
can be noticeably affected.
Does anyone have anything to add to this?
Thanks in advance
Ray
Hi Ray,
My responses for what its worth - If you are going for one of theEMC
celerra boxes.. DONT!, they ar cumbersome to support, work ok (just
ok) when they do behave, but when they break - the are horrendous.
NetAPPare a far easier box to work with, and the interface is very
obvious. If your IT structure is as explained - you wantsomething that
is quick to workaroud, andnetappfits well here (for the record,
celerra command line is also a pain).
For the record - i also believe the type of storage (and use of
VMWare) that you are deploying is wrong for the purpose... You mention
SQL and Exchange... You mention no size of userbase... But the nature
of exchange is horrible, from a storage perspective, it is totally
random in nature, and for read performance it needs to be platformed
appropriately. Also - again, dependant on user size, exchange (and
SQL) tend to drive CPU quite hard - if you concurrently load these,
and they becomebusy at the same time you are going to suffer horrible
performance!
Both SQL and Exchange require high spec of machine and also
performance around i/o subsystems...
If you want some more details - please feel free to drop me an email
cheers,
stuart.- Hide quoted text -
- Show quoted text -
Hi Stuart,
My userbase for exchange is around 150-200 users on one server and
about 80 on the other, the total store size on the main server is
about 80gb, and around 20gb on the smaller one. This is well within
the vmware capacity planning exercise. Our average cpu utilisation
among our current servers is only 3%.
The sql total db size is about 5gb so not a concern at the moment.
Thanks for the comments :)
.
- References:
- Thoughts on Netapp Fas2050 and Emc ns20
- From: Ray Breen
- Re: Thoughts on Netapp Fas2050 and Emc ns20
- From: bit.plex@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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