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November 07, 2006 | Comments: (0)
VeriTest report: Clariion CX3-80 vs NetApp FAS3070
You probably heard by now that NetApp just announced a new appliance the FAS3070 that supposedly competes with the EMC Clariion CX3-80.
What's interesting is that NetApp has also commissioned a comparison of performance and usability of the two arrays to VeriTest. You can find the report here
Please post your comments after you had a chance to read that comparison. I didn't spend much time on the report, but one of the key findings caught my attention:
During performance tests using 200 disk drives, we found that the FAS3070 configured with dual parity RAID-DPTM delivered 10 percent higher aggregate performance and 8 percent lower average latency compared to the CX3-80 configured with RAID 5.
If those results are confirmed, it would indicate that NetApp has solved some of the problems with RAID 6 that EMC is still working on, at least according to this comment from Storagezilla.
Posted by Mario Apicella on November 7, 2006 07:26 AM
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Now now Mario. I never said EMC was working on RAID 6, they may or may not be that's for the company to disclose, what I said was that they were *evaluating* it. Which is inline with their statements on the subject.
Posted by: Storagezilla at November 7, 2006 09:23 AMOf course, you said "evaluating", Storagezilla, and it's a matter of record now.
My problem is that when "evaluating" things I convince myself that I am "working", so you will probably understand my confusion there.
Thank you for your comments, always welcome.
Posted by: Mario Apicella at November 7, 2006 11:16 AMWell I can confirm the VeriTest findings. We conducted an RFP a few months ago which NetApp and EMC (among others) participated in. Comparing a CX3-40 (RAID 5) and FAS3050 (RAID 6), we found almost the same relative performance in our SQL Server testing as VeriTest reported today.
Why is it NetApp only publish performance benchmarks for systems using less than 15% of total capacity? Why not spec out the entire array and test against that?
Ah yes...
http://www.emc.com/techlib/abstract.jsp?id=1754
Posted by: Storagezilla at November 9, 2006 04:27 PMWhy is it that people believe these "commissioned" tests? Why is it that these "tests" alway use a LOT of spindles, without using much of the capacity? Load a filer up to 30% full on a volume, then run the tests, see what happens then.
Posted by: Bill at November 10, 2006 08:48 AMI would assume that you have a bad experience with ONTAP FC LUNs for OLTP? Your statement is quite generic to understand what's your trouble with the NetApp filers?
Sometimes, it's also wise to realize that NetApp boxes are true multiplatform controllers, which is what a real environment has. A real world test would then be to setup a box with FC-SAN, NFS and CIFS services with varying loads, and see performances you can monitor from every 'pore' of that box.
Posted by: Mark at November 16, 2006 07:42 PMI don't know what conditions that EMC whitepaper was written under, but it directly contradicts our experiences with NetApp SAN for Oracle and Exchange.
We're at over 60% utilization (remember we don't waste half our spindles on RAID 10 so we're already ahead of the game) and are seeing perfectly predictable high performance.
Will EMC consider having an independent 3rd party audit their curious findings about a competitor's storage?
Regarding the slanted EMC "whitepaper"
http://www.emc.com/techlib/abstract.jsp?id=1754
There is another viewpoint:
TR-3521: Cooking the Numbers: A Revealing Discussion of EMC's Measurements of NetApp SAN Performance (PDF)
http://www.netapp.com/library/tr/3521.pdf
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