NetApp FAS8000: Respond Faster to Changing IT Needs

Editor's Notes

• #4: In conversations with customers and industry analysts, we continue to hear a common message: year-over-year data growth is not slowing (Gartner predicts 800% growth 2010-2015). New business initiatives (like cloud), new application workloads and the need to monitor more “stuff” are dramatically increasing the size and complexity of the datasets that IT organizations must manage. The result is often a reactive mode of operation that does not allow you to be as responsive as you want to be and an IT infrastructure that is not optimized to support upcoming strategic initiatives that will help your organization be more competitive.
• #5: From a CIO’s perspective, there is a growing focus on service-oriented approaches to IT, in which new technologies and IT models are leveraged to improve SLAs, accelerate provisioning, and enhance return on investment and return on assets.The challenge for many IT leaders is that current infrastructure does not easily support the move from an “operator model,” in which teams stand up servers, storage, and networking for different programs to a “broker of services model,” in which resources are dynamically provisioned (locally or remotely) based on specific SLAs and budgetary requirements. This is where NetApp can help.Ask the audience:Is this what you’re seeing?What are your key transitions in IT delivery? What are your most immediate goals?Which transitions have the potential to create change? Which could disrupt your current strategy?
• #6: To meet the challenge of delivering an IT infrastructure that can be easily provisioned and scale to meet growing data requirements and new service broker models, NetApp introduces the next generation of FAS systems.Built on the #1 storage operating system, Data ONTAP, these new FAS storage systems are engineered from the ground up to scale out with no disruptions so you can be more strategic about how you grow your environment. The FAS8000 will help you:Accelerate business operations, no matter how fast your environment growsSimplify IT operations and increase uptime as you move to a service broker modelDeliver a superior ROI that lets you get the most from capital expenditures
• #9: FAS systems are purpose-built to deliver consistent, high performance for all of your SAN and NAS workloads. Unlike general-purpose server architectures that are designed to do a little of everything, FAS is optimized to quickly and reliably send and receive data. At NetApp, we put a significant amount of engineering into every FAS system so that it can handle a broad range of protocols and workloads. With the FAS8000, we have improved our advanced hardware architecture to deliver even higher performance to complete business operations faster. TECH OVERVIEW BELOW.We provide a simple, easy-to-use hybrid storage architecture that combines HDDs and flash, providing superior flash acceleration. With the FAS8000, we have significantly increased the amount of flash available in our systems, scaling up to 216TB of flash for caching.* Flash resources are automatically managed by Data ONTAP and its flash abstraction layer, minimizing management overhead while improving responsiveness to SAN and NAS workloads.Architecture DetailsMore memory as well as new, high-performance multiprocessor designs deliver up to 2.6M IOPS*.IO optimized architecture and increased NVRAM to commit writes as quickly as possible and improve performance To understand our optimized architecture, see WP-7193 for details. http://www.netapp.com/us/system/pdf-reader.aspx?pdfuri=tcm:10-115948-16&m=wp-7193.pdfData ONTAP is designed to fully leverage the multiprocessor architecture of the FAS8000 and to maximize usage of resources so that less memory, etc., is needed.Storage QoS is built into Data ONTAP so you can eliminate the impact of unexpected spikes in demand or misbehaving applications by limiting I/O at the storage virtual machine (SVM), volume, file, or LUN level. (I/O limits are set in terms of IOPs or MB/sec.)* This is for a 24-node FAS8060 scale-out configuration.
• #10: In addition to helping accelerate the core workloads that your organization depends on, FAS systems can also enhance business innovation and increase your competitive edge.With the data cloning capabilities available with Data ONTAP (FlexClone, an optional product), you can use your production data to drive business innovation, accelerate time to revenue, and run operations more efficiently. You can create writable copies of data in seconds, while using almost zero additional capacity. Once created, you can use these clones for a variety of purposes, including accelerated development of new product and service offerings, as well as business intelligence to improve strategies and identify weak spots in your overall business.As an example, NetApp has used this technology to refine our own business intelligence efforts, garnering us an Oracle Innovation award and helping us cut millions of dollars in cost from our IT budgets.As NetApp customer MercadoLibre, a Latin American online retailer, put it: “They [developers] no longer have to wait for database copies or request copies from IT operations staff—they now get daily clones of the current production database as standard procedure. FlexClone is accelerating our development efforts and helping us bring new features to market faster.”
• #11: In this section, we focus on NetApp capabilities that make the lives of your IT staff simpler so they can focus on delivering more value to the business.
• #12: For many IT organizations, storage scaling is a constant challenge. Adding capacity can be disruptive, and most storage systems have pretty narrow limits and capabilities, so you end up with multiple storage systems, silos of storage, orphaned capacity, and more complexity. The FAS8000 solves this problem with Unified Scale-Out storage that lets you grow your storage environment in the way that makes the most sense for your business needs.Scale out by adding controllers to get additional performance and capacity in a single storage pool.Or scale up individual controllers to meet specific needs. Replace one controller with another, add capacity, and add flash. You can use various types of HDDs with or without flash acceleration to meet different storage needs.Integrate existing arrays. You can even incorporate existing EMC, HDS, and NetApp E-Series arrays as part of your FAS environment (More on this later.)The result is an infrastructure that supports more IT workloads: both SAN and NAS. You can scale capacity and performance to meet your needs—without requiring hundreds of nodes like other scale-out solutions. With the FAS8000, you can grow to more than 57PB and 2.6M IOPS with only 24 systems. (Note: This metric is for the FAS8060.)Typically you have to refresh your storage environment every 3 to 5 years, with significant disruption and expense. With NetApp FAS storage, you can combine different hardware generations. You can add new storage systems and retire older ones from a cluster without affecting business operations. This means that you can evolve your storage infrastructure over time, so no forklift upgrade is needed. All scaling and maintenance operations occur without disruptions. [Next slide]
• #13: With IT now integral to your business operations, the impact of downtime – planned or unplanned – goes beyond dollars or productivity lost. Your company’s reputation might be at stake. FAS8000 hardware and Clustered Data ONTAP eliminate sources of downtime and protect your critical data against disaster.Our nondisruptive operations capabilities allow you to perform critical tasks without interrupting your business. The ability to dynamically assign, promote, and retire storage resources lets you improve service levels over the lifecycle of an application. Storage controllers can be replaced without disruption and without moving data. When data movement is required to achieve management objectives, you can nondisruptively move data between controllers—for instance, as an application makes the transition from development to production.Because you can mix generations of hardware, you can add new storage systems and retire older ones without affecting operations. Storage maintenance operations and software upgrades can be performed without interrupting your business.
• #14: One of the immediate benefits of the FAS8000 is that it is even easier to set up. With the new OnCommand System Manager, new systems can be configured three times faster [according to an ESG validation], and without requiring a lot of detailed storage expertise.Data ONTAP includes a full suite of management tools that streamline management, provide comprehensive monitoring and alerting, and allow you to automate the IT processes that are critical to your business. Once automated, processes for provisioning, data protection, cloning, and so on can be accessed directly by IT stakeholders for self-service, or integrated with the other management and cloud tools you may already be using.
• #15: For organizations moving to the cloud, FAS8000 serves as the cornerstone for cloud services. With proven Data ONTAP capabilities and OnCommand manageability, the FAS8000 enables you create a universal data platform that allows secure, dynamic data portability between on-premises and off-premises sites.With Data ONTAP and OnCommand, you can easily create and manage a secure multi-tenant environment that allows resources to be rapidly provisioned based on user requirements. Data movement and cloning capabilities in clustered Data ONTAP as well as our Integrated Data Protection stack allow you to implement a broad range of strategies, including backup to the cloud and cloudbursting. As this slide illustrates, only NetApp gives you the freedom to integrate your data with both cloud service providers and multiple industry-leading hyperscale clouds through our NetApp Private Storage (NPS) for Public Cloud solutions (multi-cloud ready).The FAS8000 enhances the Data ONTAP cloud story with high-speed connectivity (10Gb Ethernet and 16Gb FC, which we will discuss shortly) and improved performance (both system throughput and enhanced flash support) to reduce latency so that cloud solutions are faster and more responsive for applications and end users.
• #17: In addition to accelerating business operations and simplifying IT, the FAS8000 is designed to deliver a superior return on investment. One of the unique ways that the FAS8000 improves ROI is through storage virtualization. The FAS8000 is unique in the market because it is the only platform to unify SAN, NAS, and third-party storage.Using NetApp FlexArray virtualization software, the FAS8000 is able to virtualize existing storage arrays and make them part of the FAS storage environment. This enables you to take existing storage that is SAN only or that has limited scaling and use it as part of an advanced, high-performance storage infrastructure that benefits from all of the capabilities of Data ONTAP and our flash-accelerated, storage-optimized FAS controllers. With FlexArray, the useful life of existing arrays is extended, allowing a greater return on assets and enabling you to support more of your IT operations with Data ONTAP.It also allows us to guarantee that we can provide payback on FlexArray virtualization in under 9 months (see Payback Guarantee Program on NetApp.com).Another key benefit of storage virtualization is that it converges IT operations, streamlining common IT management tasks. When storage is managed by FAS and Data ONTAP, you can leverage OnCommand tools for provisioning and other tasks and use our industry-leading Integrated Data Protection tools to accelerate backup and disaster recovery to meet SLAs.
• #18: To maximize ROI, the FAS8000 offers the flexibility to support a broad range of technologies so you can build a custom solution to fit any need.Whether it’s a mix of SAN and NAS protocols or a combination of high-performance and high-density drives, the FAS8000 gives you freedom to choose the specific technologies for your environment and then adjust over time based on evolving requirements. Increased performance results in twice the price/performance value relative to existing FAS systems.The FAS8000 also includes unique capabilities to future proof your environment to minimize disruption over time. The new NetApp Universal Target Adapter (UTA2) technology is embedded in each FAS8000, enabling you to switch between the latest 16Gb FC connections and 10Gb Ethernet connectivity without installing new hardware. By changing out an SFP and the “software personality” of a port, you can quickly shift to new high-performance networks. NetApp’s optical SAS technology enables you to increase the distance between storage components from a few meters to up to 500 meters so that you can increase density in space-constrained data centers.
• #19: At NetApp, storage efficiency is not a feature, it’s a way of designing—it’s a commitment to a long-term technology agenda in which we exploit every possible opportunity to drive down cost per gigabyte.We take a multipronged approach. First, we design using standardcomponents,add reliability and performance enhancements to those raw building blocks. We employ a variety of data reduction techniques— primary-level deduplication, compression, and other techniques—to reduce the amount of data on disk and traveling over the network. Data reduction techniques give you storage cost savings, and they also result in less data over the networkfor improved performance. Our unified architectural approach lets you use the assets you have instead of building new stranded-asset silos. And you can make better use of those assets by applying thin provisioning technology, which lets you use all of the storage you’ve bought. Finally, you can make fewer copies of data. One of the biggest cost drivers for storage infrastructure is that every time a primary copy of data is created, roughly 20 to 25 secondary copies of that data also get created—test and development copies, backup copies, and disaster recovery copies. These are full copies of data, and they all consume storage capacity. Eliminating or reducing the number of those copies, reduces the cost of storage.Storage efficiency is a way of thinking. We’re constantly hunting for new ways to drive your costs down. How much capacity can you save with NetApp storage efficiency? For virtual environments, we guarantee that you’ll reduce your capacity requirements by 50% compared to traditional storage*.*http://www.netapp.com/us/solutions/virtualization/guarantee.aspx
• #21: NetApp Services helps you make sure that you get all the benefits of FAS8000 hardware and Data ONTAP. For example, you have to follow best practices to achieve optimum storage efficiency; the same is true for nondisruptive operations. By following proven industry best practices in our service delivery, we make sure that you get the most from your NetApp investments.
• #22: The NetApp advantage comes down to the completeness of our storage and service offerings. This translates into business success by accelerating your business operations and streamlining your IT operations so that your team spends less time fighting fires and more time focused on business value. And, because IT budgets are always tight, we can help you achieve higher return on investment and maximize the value of your existing assets.
• #26: NOTE TO PRESENTER: This slide provides more detail on the NetApp Flash Portfolio for more technically oriented audiences. It fits well after slide 8: Accelerate SAN and NAS Workloads.How you deploy flash depends on your specific needs. To make sure that we provide the right options for your unique environment, FAS supports a broad range of flash acceleration options, including:Hybrid storage with Caching on FAS. For most applications, not every piece of data needs to be flash accelerated. Usually there is only a small working set of information. With our caching options, you only need to provide enough flash to cache and accelerate your working set, and we have tools to tell you how big that is.Persistent storage on FAS. Of course, there may be some applications (or subsets of application data) that need to be on flash all the time. For these applications, we offer the ability to create all-flash storage volumes or even an all-flash FAS system.Caching on server. For applications that require extremely low latency, it can be helpful to use flash directly in the server. NetApp can integrate with host-side flash devices, extending the value of Data ONTAP caching into the server while guaranteeing data coherency and data protection.
• #27: NOTE TO PRESENTER: This slide provides more detail on NetApp integration. It fits well after slide 13 (Simplify and Automate Management)when you need to include it.When it comes to storage, it just makes sense to choose infrastructure that offers complete integration for enterprise applications such as Oracle Database, SAP, and Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, and SharePoint. Integration facilitates deployment, management, and protection of important applications. NetApp is widely regarded as an industry leader in the area of integration, providing API integration across the broadest set of technology partners, platforms, applications, and tools. We have more points of integration than any other storage vendor. This helps you to reduce IT complexity and increase availability, further accelerating the speed of business.
• #28: Note to PRESENTER:This slide is designed to summarize the benefits of the FAS8000, especially for more technical audiences. IT fits well after slide 19 to sum up technical advantages before talking about services.With the FAS8000, we’ve paid close attention to every detail, but it’s really the combination of everything that the platform delivers that makes the difference:Starting with reliable, scale-out hardware that delivers performance, reliability, and innovative features like FlexArray.Combined with Data ONTAP, the #1 branded storage OS, delivering efficiency, data protection, multi-tenancy, QoS, and more.On top of that, OnCommand management tools let you control, automate, integrate, and analyze your infrastructure for optimal efficiency.And finally, the FAS8000 includes unmatched integration that supports leading hypervisors, applications, and management tools plus open APIs.And all backed by NetApp.
• #31: NOTE TO PRESENTER: This slide summarizes the official benchmark results that NetApp will be releasing at launch time. Preliminary results just came out at the time this presentation was created, so additional performance information may be available during and after the launch. The 2.6M IOPS number we have used as the maximum performance number in this presentation is based on internal testing using a rigorous NFS workload, but has not been published as an “official” benchmark result, nor is it directly validated by these results since there is no official SPECsfs submission for the FAS8060.NOTE TO PRESENTER: IOPS. With the arrival of all-flash arrays and configurations, the term IOPS has been thrown around quite freely, often without qualifying what type of workload was used to achieve the result. The big numbers you hear typically correspond to the easiest workloads: entirely or almost entirely 4KB reads. SPECsfs and SPC-1 are independent, closely monitored benchmarks based on workloads that are designed to replicate real-world applications. A significant portion of each benchmark is made up of writes, and it is much harder to achieve big numbers, even with all-flash configurations. The record number of SPC-1 is 1.2M IOPS for any configuration, all-flash, hybrid, or all-disk. The official NetApp result for the 24-node FAS6240 of 1.5M IOPS remains the leader on the SPECsfs NFS benchmark among the major storage vendors. For the results in this slide, show the official results and talk about the fact that our internal testing suggests linear scaling as cluster nodes are added.Details.SPECsfs configuration: FAS8020 with 144 disks total plus 512GB Flash Cache in each controller. These are extremely strong results for the FAS8020 and indicate how the FAS8000 line will excel in terms of both scale-up and scale-out, delivering great IOPS and extremely low latency.NFS110281 SPECsfs2008 IOPS at 1.18ms ORT. (Overall Response Time)This is an extremely strong result for the FAS8020 and indicates how the FAS8000 line will excel in terms of both scale-up and scale-out, delivering great IOPS and extremely low latency.The 2-node result matches the IOPS of a 14-node configuration (7X more controllers) from a scale-out competitor. (Last results published in 2011)Competitor ORT was almost 3X higher.At full scale-out (24-nodes) the FAS8020 should achieve up to 1.3 million IOPS based on internal testing. This configuration delivers sub-millisecond latency up to 65K IOPS and stays under 2ms up to almost 100K. These latencies approach those for all-flash configurations.CIFS105050 SPECsfs2008 IOPS at 1.42ms ORT. The 2-node result matches the IOPS of a 7-node configuration from a scale-out competitor. (Last results published in 2011)Competitor ORT was more than 2X higher.At full scale-out (24-nodes) the FAS8020 could achieve up to 1.3 million IOPS based on internal testing. This configuration delivers sub-millisecond latency Up to 50K IOPS and stays under 2ms up to almost 85K.SPC-1 Configuration: 192 disks total plus 512 GB Flash Cache in each controller Results. 86K @$5.63 per IOP based on list price. (Other vendors typically show discounts ranging from 35% to 70%, so the $/IOP number will appear lower.)A close recent competing result achieved 110K IOPS @ $4.41 (54% hardware discount) in a configuration with 896 disks.Most recent SPC-1 results focus on performance, but provide just a few TB of capacity.NetApp hybrid storage lets you optimize your storage configuration to achieve both the capacity and performance you need.
• #33: When compared to other FAS systems, the FAS8000 is a superior foundation for cloud services and a great investment for customers and service providers.The FAS 8000 is multi-cloud readyThe FAS 8000 maximizes flexibility and freedom of choice for NetApp Private Storage (NPS) for Public Cloud solutions, such as NPS for Amazon Web Services. NetApp Private Storage for Public Cloud solutions NPS for Public Cloud solutions offer the elasticity and savings of public cloud with the data stewardship, security, availability, performance, and control of dedicated enterprise storage, hosted in direct-connect data centers, which expose data to public cloud compute. More information at:http://www.netapp.com/us/solutions/cloud/amazon-web-services.aspxNetApp is the only major storage vendor that gives you the ability to use private data storage with public cloud. FAS8000 makes NPS for Public Cloud solutions betterThe FAS 8000 offers a broad range of onboard connectivity so that you have the freedom and flexibility to connect right out of the box. Each model includes onboard 10GbE, GbE, and 6Gb SAS. In addition, UTA2 (unified target adapter 2) ports can be converted between 16Gb FC and 10GbE. Because you don’t have to buy adapters, PCI card slots remain free for other uses. The FAS 8000 provides a better return on assets for service providers (SPs) who offer public, private, or hybrid cloud services built on NetApp:Versatility makes it future-proof: Unified storage, tiers of storage, flexible IO.FlexArray lets you integrate with existing arraysSimplicity and ease of use.The FAS8000 enables SPs to offer a superior customer experienceWith the FAS8000, service providers can offer customers higher performance and more control over how assets are used--improving SLAs and/or creating new services offerings. Key benefits include 2-3x increase in flash acceleration, 2x price/performance, and storage QoS to limit and control resource consumption.
• #34: PRESENTERS NOTE: The DS4243 is no longer available in new system shipments. It remains available as add-on storage. The main way that a customer will end up with a FAS8000 with DS4243 is through controller upgrades from previous generation FAS3200 or FAS6200 (or earlier) controllers.NSE=NetApp Storage Encryption the NetApp implementation of full disk encryption (FDE). NSE uses HDDs with integrated encryption capabilities. Data ONTAP provides support for these disks through NSE. Mixed shelf configurations combine HDDs and SSDs in a single shelf to support Flash Pool™ only. Flash Pool configurations can also be created using shelf-to-shelf configurations that combine SSDs from one shelf with other shelves of HDDs.For the latest information on available drive capacities see: http://www.netapp.com/us/products/storage-systems/disk-shelves-and-storage-media/disk-shelves-tech-specs.aspxThis link is for the FAS Disk Shelves and Storage Media Tech Specs page.
• #37: Presenter: This slide shows NetApp leadership in preventing problems from occurring. NetApp not only provides great built-in resiliency, we have tools (AutoSupport tools, OnCommand Balance and Insight) that identify risks so action can be taken before a problem occurs.Key points:Risk analysis. NetApp AutoSupport uses big data analytics to identify patterns in billions of rows of log data gathered from thousands of deployed NetApp systems. The risk signatures that result from this analysis allow you to identify and proactively address issues that could affect availability, performance, or efficiency.Service analytics. NetApp service analytics tools (OnCommand Balance and OnCommand Insight) allow you to identify issues not just with NetApp storage, but with third-party storage and other infrastructure elements such as switches, servers, and VMs. This includes configuration issues between elements that wouldn’t be flagged by a storage, network, or server management tool.With NetApp scale-out,you can immediately correct any potential issues, removing risk from your infrastructure and protecting availability, performance, and efficiency.
• #38: Clustered Data ONTAP 8.2 includes capabilities for data resiliency, disaster recovery, and backups that take advantage of NetApp storage efficiency.Integrated Data Protection begins with a high level of local data resiliency from the combination of the NetApp Raid-DP capability and the Data ONTAP high-availability architecture. You can also use block-based asynchronous volume-level replication to mirror volumes locally, within a cluster if desired.For disaster recovery operations, use block-based asynchronous volume-level replication to mirror volumes from the HA cluster at the primary site to the HA cluster at the disaster recovery site. Replication takes advantage of NetApp storage efficiency as the data is compressed before it is transmitted over the WAN. The mirrored volume is also deduplicated.Backups are performed as required using local application-aware NetApp Snapshot copies and NDMP output to tape.