Hi Eric,

I generally stay away from using a NetApp for SAN, but not for any particular reason other than it's first and foremost a really, really good NAS machine, and SAN is more complicated and a bit less efficient in terms of storage utilization.

When I've used it, though, performance has been fine, and pretty much on par with anything else, given that there are of course differences in hardware and workloads.

As far as tiering, the NetApp doesn't tier the way IBM does with Easytier, or a 3PAR does with Adaptive Optimization.  On NetApp, you can add SSD to an aggregate (called flashpool) to act as a large cache, and the NetApp can utilize this very well to increase performance.  However, you can't tier automatically between SAS and nearline drives, and it doesn't actually *move* blocks up and down to SSD -- it just uses it as an advanced cache.

Using a flashpool with nearline drives can work very well, though, again depending on the workload, and can save money over buying SAS drives.

-Adam

On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 4:19 PM, Eric Peng <epeng@esri.com> wrote:

Folks,

 

Does anyone have experience with running production workloads on FC-based LUNs on NetApp?  Am curious to know how performance of hosting virtual machines (including Exchange, database environments) compares to more traditional block-based SANs (EMC, 3Par, Hitachi, etc), since what I’ve read is that NetApp’s LUNs feature still sits on top of WAFL?

 

We have some native FAS NetApps, along with many N-series rebranded NetApps, but all are run in 7-Mode and using NFS connections.

 

Also, how do you all implement data tiering in your NetApp environments?  We are currently using IBM SAN (Storwize/V7000) and this has tiering capability.  We’d consider moving some SAN workloads to NetApp if we could get as good SAN performance and also address the tiering capability.

 

Thanks,

 

Eric Peng | Enterprise Storage Systems Administrator
Esri | 380 New York St. | Redlands, CA 92373 | USA
T 909 793 2853 x3567 | M 909 367 1691
epeng@esri.com | esri.com

 


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