NetApp V EMC, A Battle on Two Fronts: Strategic Acquisitions and Performance
NetApp V EMC, A Battle on Two Fronts: Strategic Acquisitions and Performance
November 10, 2006: It’s one for one on the encryption and data protection and migration acquisitions front, with NetApp and EMC’s recent respective acquisitions of Avamar ($165 million) and Topio ($160 million).
The acquisitions occurred within a week of each other, signalling a further threat to the tape market. Earlier this year the two purchased RSA (EMC; US$1.3 billion) and Decru (NetApp; US$272 million).
But the message by NetApp for its FAS3070 SAN is all about ease of management, lower latency and higher performance with the release of a study commissioned by NetApp comparing it with EMC’s highest-capacity CLARiiON system, the CX3-80. Twenty-four hours after the release of the study it announced its purchase of Topio Software, boosting its data protection and migration suite. The purchases fit neatly with each vendor’s push to help customers migrate and grab their share of customers making the shift from tape to disk.
The series of tests compared the two storage systems under Oracle OLTP (online transaction processing) FCSCAN (fibre channel device scan utility) workloads. NetApp comes up trumps in performance and latency for a 200-disk configuration and faster for a single application. Using Snapshot, it took 27 minutes to clone a 400GB LUN on EMC’s CX3-80 and only 7 seconds on NetApp’s FAS3070. NetApp’s FAS also required 29% less disk space when provisioning an Oracle OLTP database.
In contrast to EMC’s recent revision of its storage line-up, no mentioned was made of energy efficiency when using NetApp hardware. But both companies have promoted better administrative tools in recognition of shrinking IT budgets across the world. At the press conference Mark Heers, Net App’s APAC regional marketing director, pointed to the Commonwealth Bank’s success with NetApp’s storage management software, with the bank able to reduce its storage administration staffing from 50 to three over three years.
Heers also points to the scalability of the FAS3070, which supports a 4GB SAN. A major advantage in terms of its scalability is that NetApp’s storage administration software works across the full spectrum of its storage systems.
Heers yesterday hinted towards NetApp’s increased focus on storage management software. The hint was today supported by the news of NetApp’s purchase of Topio software which enables replication, recovery, and data protection over any distance in heterogeneous storage environments.
Jay Kidd, senior vice president and general manager, Emerging Products Group, Network Appliance, said, "With the addition of Topio, enterprises using legacy storage systems can create working data copies in seconds while dramatically decreasing overall storage requirements. This not only provides immediate cost savings, but also allows companies to accelerate their application test and development to bring their products to market much more quickly."
In a press statement, NetApp says the heterogeneous capabilities of Topio Software will allow users to consolidate all of their DR data onto a single platform and use this DR copy for such business applications as testing and reporting. NetApp appears to be developing its arsenal of acquisitions, having already purchased encryption market leader, Decru in June for $272 million.
Key findings of Test
Performance tests using 200 disk drives found the FAS3070, configured with dual parity RAID-DP delivered 10 percent higher aggregate performance and 8 percent lower average latency compared to the CX3-80 configured with RAID 5.
Using a provisioned 400GB LUN and the FCP protocol, the study found that the FAS3070 configured with RAID-DP generated 6.8 times the performance and 85 percent lower average latency compared to the CX3-80 when using RAID 1/0. When the same test was conducted after provisioning the 400GB LUN on a MetaLUN, the FAS3070 configured with RAID-DP generated 1.95 times the performance and 49 percent lower average latency compared to the CX3-80.
Using the snapshot capability with the CX3-80 during performance testing resulted in a sustained, 50 percent drop in overall performance. The study found no sustained degradation in overall performance as a result of using Snapshot technology available on the FAS3070.
Provisioning enterprise class OLTP database on the CX3-80 required 39 percent more physical disks compared to the FAS3070. Using NetApp FlexVol™ technology permitted provisioning an enterprise class OLTP database using a total of 56 physical disks compared to 78 disks to provision the same database on the CX3-80.
Test configurations required less time to complete a series of typical provisioning and administrative tasks on the FAS3070 compared to the CX3- 80. For example, it required over 27 minutes to create a clone of a 400GB LUN on the CX3-80 compared to only 7 seconds on the FAS3070.