Earlier this week, NetApp unveiled their 50% Virtualization Guarantee:
Show us how much data you need to store in your virtual environment. We guarantee that you will use 50% less storage with NetApp compared to a baseline of traditional storage. You’ll enjoy better protection and more flexibility, and you’ll use less storage.
Some people are calling it a marketing joke and others are saying the 50% utilization is just a matter of how you perform the measurements. I’ll keep my thoughts to myself, except to say I disagree with the requirement that the baseline system (against which the customer’s system will be measured to determine if the 50% reduction is being met; more requirements here under “How it works”) use RAID 10. Let’s be honest: this does heavily tilt the odds in NetApp’s favor. Had it been mine to design, I would have let the strength of NetApp’s technologies like thin provisioning, deduplication, cloning, etc., stand on their own.
The real question is this, though: what do you think about the 50% virtualization guarantee? Speak out—courteously and with full disclosure—in the comments below.
5 responses so far ↓
1 Brent Ozar // Oct 3, 2008 at 12:46 pm
Frankly, it reminds me of when I quoted both EMC and NetApp solutions for the same data warehouse. EMC lowballed me for drive quantities and said don’t worry, performance will be fine, trust us. I said if it’s not, how much does it cost me per spindle to get it to meet our requirements? The negotiations went south after that. Sure, anybody can cut the spindles or storage capacity - but don’t lose sight of performance guarantees too.
2 D. Heran // Oct 3, 2008 at 7:26 pm
I don’t understand the RAID 10 baseline either… we get pretty good reduction with a dual parity drive configuration.
3 My data deduplication guarantee is better than your guarantee | Storage Blogs - Storage Monkeys Blogs // Oct 9, 2008 at 8:57 am
[...] Registerpointsout Sepaton’s new guarantee of VTL data deduplication ratios on the heels of NetApp’s recent guarantee to reduce storage in virtual environments by 50%. The Sepaton guarantee is that the S2100-ES2 [...]
4 Bill Feetham // Oct 21, 2008 at 8:49 pm
I think NetApp took some notes from Compellent (MS Storage partner of 2008, Best of VMworld 2008, Info Pro SAN of the Year (twice in a row)) they have a similar guarantee but less strings if anyone would like to review (bill@sidepath.com).
Compellent eliminates white space on vmdk files(VM’s) and delivers true thin provisioning while dedicating all drives to all volumes striped at the block level across different disc tiers at different RAID groups to increase performance and maximize disk use. The technology of Compellent truly sets it apart from NetApp, EMC, and any other Tier 1 storage provider! Feel free to inquire with any questions.
Bill Feetham
bill@sidepath.com
5 slowe // Oct 21, 2008 at 10:09 pm
Bill, it would appear that you work for a Compellent reseller. Please be sure to openly disclose affiliations–thanks!
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