Contour Data Solutions Blog » HP

Netapp vs HP EVA

roccog — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 14:36:00 +0000

Comparison

Product
Specification

NetApp FAS

HP EVA

2050 / 3140

4400 / 6400 / 8400

Redundant HA

Controllers

Yes

Snapshots

Yes

low impact

Yes

licensed, high CoFW impact

Replication

Yes, any FAS to FAS

No, EVA to EVA only

Deduplication

Yes

Thin Provisioning

Yes

No (DCM; has 2TB limit)

SnapManager Functionality

Yes

Exchange, SQL Server, Oracle, SAP, SharePoint, VMware

Yes

Exchange, Oracle, SAP, SQL Server (requires DataProtector)

Upgradeable Across Product Families

Yes

Management

Console

FilerView, DFM

CommandView EVA

Max Raw Capacity

104 / 420

96 / 216 / 324

Supported Protocols

FC, iSCSI, CIFS, NFS

FC only

iSCSI with extra cost bridge

Industry Benchmarks

Yes

SAN; SPC, NAS; SpecSFS

HP Competitive Analysis

Overview

· HP is one of the world's largest IT companies

· Products range from printing, personal computing, servers, software and services to IT infrastructure.

· Storage plays a relatively small part of HP's revenues (less than 1%)

· EVA one of six incompatible storage families (AiO, MSA, LHN, EVA, XP, PolyServe)

Strengths

· Many channel partners and broad range of offerings

· Can provide a one-stop-shop for the small to mid-sized IT organization with blades, servers, networking infrastructure

· HP’s offerings now include consulting & outsourcing with the purchase of EDS

· Innovative RAID virtualization technology

· Vraid technology allows for LUNs to be virtualized over pooled disks

· Demand-allocated virtual capacity free snapshots

· Ability to mix FC and “FATA” disks in the same enclosure, now with SSD

· Integrated management and configuration tools

Weaknesses

Workmanlike but uninspiring storage
Low and mid range arrays all suffer from a lack of application integration
Limited connectivity and upgradeability, poor software offerings, and lack-luster performance; SSD limited to max of 8 72GB drives
High maintenance and service charges
No upgrade path from previous EVAx100 range or to or from any other HP array family
Requires double the spare disk space using “distributed sparing” technique
No QoS workload prioritization (such as FlexShare)
Vraid best-practices defeat built-in disk load-balancing abilities
Inefficient, complex and inflexible remote replication (CAVA)
Disruptive write-cache disablement required for consistent snapshots
Ffast restore capability for snapshots requires MirrorClone
Demand-allocated snapshots silently dropped when out of space
No native multi-protocol support.
Command View EVA cannot manage any other HP storage array
Distributed sparing requires 2 – 4 times the space of a physical disk

Positioning

Simplicity: Starter Kits are a robust, highly available small to medium SAN solutions that are easy to install, use and scale at an affordable price.
Agility: Virtualization ensures all the disks in the array are used more efficiently, with no stranded capacity, keeping them all busier and eliminating bottlenecks that lower performance.
Virtually instantaneous: Snapclone and capacity-free Snapshot (Vsnap) and Delta Resync (Mirrorclone) – Allows immediate use of the clone copy. Saves disk space and improves disk efficiency and utilization.
Improved performance over previous range; claims of up to 20%

Why NetApp vs. HP EVA

Greater data integrity without performance impact via RAID-DP & Maintenance Center
Lower TCO (Total Cost of Ownership)
o NetApp easier to install, configure, and deploy
o Flex and Snap-suite dramatically simplify administration and allocation of storage
o Staff only needs trained in one technology
Greater versatility
o Integrated multi-protocol SAN/NAS in one box
o Simultaneous FCP & iSCSI in one box
Common compatible architecture across the entire product range
Full interoperability and upgradeability across entire range product range
Staff only needs to be trained in one technology
Superior host and application SW support
Greater NetApp scalability; top of range EVA8400 to XP is a large gap
Superior solution completeness; includes NAS out of the box

Questions To Ask

Reliability

· How much disk overhead does distributed sparing require and what level of protection do I get for it?

· Availability

· What RTO and RPO do my EVA snapshots provide?

· How long does it take me to fully restore from a snapshot?

· How many snapshots can I keep online?

· What happens if I run out of physical capacity for my demand-allocated snapshots?

· Can I replicate my snapshots?

· Is one-to-many replication possible? Over which protocols?

Performance

· What impact do snapshots have on performance?

· What impact does adding storage have on performance?

· What impact does mixing Vraid1 with Vraid5 have on performance?

· What impact does asynchronous replication have on performance when the write buffer fills up?

· Is the effective I/O cache really 4GB? Please break down how that is actually used.

· Why no industry benchmarks, like SPC?

Upgradeability and Manageability

· How can I upgrade to or from other HP storage arrays?

· How many native protocols does an EVA support?

· Can I manage the EVA series with the same management framework as my other HP arrays?

· Can I upgrade from the EVAx100 range to the EVAx400 range?

HP FUD	Claim	Turnaround
NetApp is the undisputed king of fragmentation	WAFL’s “write anywhere” attribute causes fragmentation and poor performance	Is there any independent evidence of this claim? If WAFL is as badly flawed as HP claims, how could NetApp possibly have become the company that it is today?
NetApp systems lose data	Referral to anecdotal media reports of data loss	EVA silently deletes snapshots Anyone can un-initialize an EVA from the front LCD panel EVA offers no guaranteed protection against double disk failure
RAID-4 is a performance bottleneck	Single parity disk a bottleneck	RAID6 (DP) Standard on all NetApp systems. (Not available on EVA) EVA COfW snapshots disrupt performance. Disk leveling disrupts performance
Disk rebuilds are very long and impact performance	Single RAID-4 parity disk and SW based RAID impact performance on rebuild	NetApp offers “Rapid RAID Recovery” Routine EVA disk leveling disrupts performance CA async replication disrupts performance. Can the EVA throttle disk rebuilds?
NetApp introduces risk by introducing more vendors	HP offers a one-stop-shopping solution for all your storage needs	HP EVA systems are *not* compatible or upgradeable from MSA or to XP systems HP’s storage families each require completely separate management infrastructures, introducing risk. NetApp offers a single architecture across all platforms.
Usable capacity much lower than gross capacity	WAFL needs as much as 100% capacity overhead	HP is counting in snapshot reserve space which EVA also requires EVA’s “distributed sparing” technique requires 2 to 4 times the capacity of a physical disk to single spare protection
Multiple NetApp systems complex to manage	Each system must be managed separately	HP requires a separate storage system for each protocol HP storage families must each be managed separately
HP EVA does that too!	EVA can do anything NetApp can do.	See section “Things To Remember”

HP Beats Dell on 3Par Deal

dougc — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 11:57:10 +0000

So the two largest brand name technology companies out there today go head to head for 3Par, ok why? The largest and most known names you see on their customer list are companies that do social engineering, which are usually under fire for losing people’s personal information and such. So if you are the storage provider of these cloud services why would anyone want to jump right in? That question by the way is open for conversation because I don’t know. In the end HP beat Dell by $1 a share and took the company; I guess HP won’t be a Alliance Partner anymore but I wonder if Dell still will be? Longer, more detailed article linked below.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5j6wPsjjs0oYAoJQ9hSH7t8e5smDgD9I026IG2

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/09/03/hp-vs-dell-bidding-war-ended-spectacle/

HP MSA and EMC AX Comparison

roccog — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 22:48:00 +0000

HARDWARE COMPARISON	EMC	HP
HARDWARE COMPARISON	CLARiiON AX4	MSA1500	MSA1510i
Connectivity	Fibre Channel or iSCSI	Fibre Channel	iSCSI
Host ports	2 x 4 Gb Fibre Channel or 2 x 1 Gb IP per SP	2 x 2 Gb Fibre Channel per controller	2 x 1 Gb IP per controller
Maximum hosts (high availability)	64	20
Controllers	1 or 2 SPs	1 or 2
Drive options	146, 300* GB 15k SAS 400 GB 10k SAS 750 GB 1TB* SATA	36, 72, 146, 300 GB 15k SAS 73, 146, 300 GB 10k SAS 160, 250, 500, 750 GB SATA
Drives	4 to 60	Up to 96
Raw capacity	584 GB to 60 TB	Up to 64 TB
Cache	1 GB per SP	256 or 512MB per controller
Operating system support	Windows 2000 Windows Server 2003 Linux HP-UX AIX Solaris Netware VMware	Windows 2000 Windows Server 2003 Linux HP-UX Netware SCO Open VMS Tru64 VMware	Windows 2000 Windows Server 2003 VMware

ARRAY BASED SOFTTWARE	EMC CLARiiON AX4	HP
Snaps	SnapView	Host-based only
Clones	SnapView	None
Management	Navisphere	Separate software
Snaps/clones per array	256 / 128	–
Snaps/clones per LUN	8	–
Snaps/clone of same LUN	Yes	–
Snaps from clones	Yes	–
Local copy from remote replica	Yes, clone	–
Dedicated snap area	Yes	–
Access to source LUN during copy	Yes	–
Consistent splits	Yes	–
Protected Restore	Yes	–
Snap rollback	Yes	–

ARRAY BASED REPLCATION	EMC CLARiiON AX4	HP
Products	MirrorView	None
Cross-generational platform support	Yes	Yes
Management	Navisphere	Command View
Synchronous mode	Yes	No
Asynchronous mode	Yes	Yes
Replication over IP	Only via bridges	only via bridges
Extended distance with Asynchronous mode	Yes	No
Bidirectional replication	Yes	Yes
Copies per array	100	256
LUN fan-out	1 or 2	–
Array fan-out	1:4	1:2
Array fan-in	4:1	2:1
Consistency technology	Yes	Yes