NetApp Clustered Data ONTAP 8
Why NetApp Won
•The demo was based on a real-life customer with real issues and real results
•Nondisruptive data migration was cited by the audience as the most compelling part of the demo
•NetApp clearly demonstrated its value proposition in this space
Setting the Stage
VMworld U.S. 2012’s Global Diamond Sponsors went head-to-head in the first-ever VMworld Challenge. Each participant was tasked with delivering a four-minute demo of its vSphere integration and capabilities to an audience of 10,000 VMworld attendees. At the start of the demos, each participant disclosed their charity of choice. NetApp chose Be The Match, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping patients in need of bone marrow transplants.
The Demos
Founder and EVP David Hitz illustrated how NetApp clustered Data ONTAP helps address problems that service providers face in cloud environments today. The demos show how PeakColo, a cloud services provider headquarted in Denver, Colorado, uses NetApp and VMware to provide the back-end infrastructure to service providers who offer standup cloud services to their end-user customers.To understand these demos, it helps to understand PeakColo’s data center architecture. Their cloud infrastructure offering consists of various layers, with VMware on top, then servers and LANS, with storage on the bottom.The entire infrastructure is managed with vCloud Director®. PeakColo has hundreds of cloud service provider customers. All are on a common network, with NetApp storage systems as one large, shared pool across all customers via multi-tenancy. Data ONTAP allows PeakColo to manage everything as a single cluster on an agile data infrastructure.
DEMO 1: Create and Provision a Virtual SAN
PeakColo has provisioned more clouds than most other providers. Speed is critical to the company’s ability to stay competitive in this space, and they achieve this speed with instant provisioning. In this demo, PeakColo builds an entire vSAN with a single command. It would take a weekend to rack equipment, pull cables, configure LUNS, and more to build a physical SAN. PeakColo builds a vSAN in 10 seconds for a hosted customer via a one-line command to NetApp clustered Data ONTAP 8. This demo shows a software-defined data center for storage. According to Hitz, NetApp does for storage what VMware does for servers.
DEMO 2: Nondisruptive Data Migration
In the second demo, PeakColo demonstrates how it fixes a performance problem that is causing a customer to experience severe latency by migrating a 30-VMOracle® Database ecosystem from SATA drives to a higher-performing system based on flash disks—again with one command. The current system has a5-millisecond latency, which is unacceptable. PeakColo “tells” the cluster to move data to a much higher-performing storage system. The migration happens completely at the storage layer. VMware doesn’t even know about it. No vMotion® and no configuring hosts or VMs. Whether the environment has 20 VMware hosts or 200 VMs, this one command handles the entire migration. After the migration, the latency time goes down to zero. Over the years, individual storage systems come and go. But with NetApp, the cluster lives forever. Transparent migration is the foundation.
DEMO 3: 50% PeakColo Cuts Storage Costs in Half with Deduplication
The third demo highlights PeakColo’s results from NetApp deduplication. PeakColo has seen an average of 66% reduction in production data. Overall, the company has cut its storage costs in half.
Results
To punctuate this last point, David Hitz comments that his goal is to sell theaudience less storage, and exclaims, “what other storage vendor does that?”The crowd goes wild, and the audience is then asked to use its handheld votingdevice to choose either EMC, HP, Dell, Cisco, or NetApp as having the best demo. The results are returned, and NetApp is the victor!
Summary Challenge
•Four-minute demo of VMware® vSphere® integration and capabilities
• Demo NetApp® clustered DataONTAP® 8 to create customer’s own vSAN
•Where/When: VMworld U.S. 2012, San Francisco, CA
The Competitors
- Cisco
- Dell
- EMC
- HP
- NetApp
The Stakes
•Bragging rights and a$10,000 donation to thewinner’s favorite charity
