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QTS
Solution Spotlight: Overview NetApp FAS series SANs provide industry-leading features and capabilities, at a competitive price for mid-market organizations. NetApp offers a variety of models providing varying hardware scalability and performance, building off of a common operating system (Data ONTAP) to provide uniformity across their product line.
A SAN consists of a
centralized, high-performance/highly available storage platform, along with a
network switching platform for access to the storage device (the ?Storage Area
Network? ? typically either iSCSI as a cost effective fabric or Fibre Channel as
a much more expensive but higher throughput fabric).
The advantage of a Storage Area Network in a virtualization context is
that you can store your Virtual Machines on the SAN, and therefore load them up
on any server connected to the SAN.
This is what enables features like VMware?s DRS, HA and VMotion, as you need the
VMs to be portable across multiple SAN-connected servers.
SANs also provide a
number of related benefits including: ? Centralized data onto a shared storage repository enables more efficient utilization of disk space, so you don?t run out of space on one server while having excess space on another ? Centralizing data onto a shared storage repository enables Server Clustering and related High Availability configurations ? Centralizing Virtual Machines onto a shared storage repository enables High Availability features such as VMware?s VMotion, HA and DRS. ? Centralizing data and Virtual Machines onto a SAN allows for SAN-to-SAN replication, empowering Disaster recovery scenarios ? Centralizing data onto a SAN with a high number of disk drives improves performance for applications like Exchange and SQL Server, which benefit from spreading data across larger numbers of disks (and more read/write heads) ? SANs often support different disk types/speeds, so you can create a centralized storage platform with high performance SCSI/Fibre Channel disk drives for databases and applications, and slower/cheaper SATA disk drives for archiving and secondary storage/backups ? Snapshot functions (if the vendor provides them) in the SAN allow you to leverage the SAN to save and restore prior versions of files/VMs, allowing the SAN to become the primary restore point for deleted/corrupted/lost files, with backup systems becoming a secondary/DR platform for backup/restore. This combined with NDMP support (direct backup of the SAN from the backup platform) allows for more efficient backups. Key
Benefits ? NetApp is the only vendor to support native disk de-duplication on their SAN platform (most vendor support de-dupe of backups only). This means that data blocks that are duplicative only gets written once to the SAN, and referenced via pointers by subsequent files with the same data. In the case of virtualization, for example, VMs often contain the same Windows Server bits, so de-duplication allows you to avoid storing the same data over and over ? in the case of virtualized servers, NetApp guarantees 50% space savings in virtualization scenarios due to this feature. ? NetApp supports RAID-DP (a variant of RAID 6, with dual dedicated parity drives), which provides RAID 10 (1+0) level performance at close to RAID 5 pricing. This translates to having to buy less disk drives to get high performance for a given disk capacity, versus SANs that leverage RAID 1+0 ? NetApp?s support for Thin Provisioning allows you to re-size disk volumes with flexibility as needed, so for example if you need more disk space for Exchange and have unused space on your SQL volume, you can ?shrink? the SQL volume and give the space to Exchange ? NetApp uses the same operating system on all flavors of their hardware, making it easy to upgrade and expand your SAN platform without new learning curve (versus HP and EMC which have different software/operating systems for each step in their line card) ? NetApp?s multi-protocol support and flexibility allows you to mix iSCSI and Fibre Channel support, as well as support for the CIFS (Microsoft file sharing) and NFS protocols, allowing you to turn the SAN into a highly available NAS/File Server ? NetApp leverages their Snapshot technology to allow for very efficient backup/recovery of files at very low disk space overhead
Optional Software ? NetApp?s optional CIFS license can turn the high-performance, highly redundant SAN into a NAS, removing the need for Windows file servers ? NetApp?s optional SnapRestore software allows rapid rollback/recovery of large groups of files or the entire SAN to a prior restore point, in seconds ? NetApp?s optional SnapManager products (which build upon SnapRestore) allow for application-aware backup and restore of data from: o Microsoft Exchange o Microsoft SharePoint o Microsoft SQL Server o Oracle o VMware ? NetApp?s optional SnapMirror software allows for replication of data from NetApp SAN to NetApp SAN, over LAN or WAN links, while Replicator-X software allows replication between different SAN platforms ? NetApp?s optional FlexClone software allows for rapid creation of duplicate data on the SAN with minimal disk overhead ? for example, spinning up a copy of a 500GB SQL database to set up a test environment, without taking up another 500GB of disk space ? NetApp?s optional SnapLock software allows for you to designate storage space as WORM (Write Once, Read Mostly) so you can comply with retention policies for designated data. Additional Information Contact your QTS account manager for more information on how a NetApp SAN can serve as the core foundation for your 21st Century Network. |
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This site last updated
04/19/09 |