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Title: NetApp FAS Systems: Technical Overview - MAY11 - UK

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NetAPP FAS Systems: Technical Overview

NetApp® FAS systems offer scalable, high-availability storage for Windows®, UNIX® and Linux® servers. <<ClientShort>> can simultaneously access data over FC and iSCSI storage area networks (SANs) and access files by using standard protocols for network-attached storage (NAS).

NetApp FAS systems offer:

High-performance and high-density disk drives in either homogeneous or mixed storage configurations, to give application owners a choice of tiered storage options

Support for both SAN and NAS environments to address both primary and secondary storage needs

The ability to quickly upgrade to newer controllers or models while keeping data intact

Non-disruptive capacity expansion

FAS6080

FAS6040 FAS3170

FAS2020

FAS2050

FAS3140

FAS3160

Midsize EnterpriseRemote Office/Branch Office

Enterprise Data Center

2352TB

1680TB

1680TB

68TB

104TB840TB

1344TB

Capacity

Pe

rfo

rman

ce

136TB

FAS2040

Midrange Data Center

Figure 1) NetApp FAS family of storage systems.

NetApp Unified Storage Architecture offers the flexibility to manage, support and scale your environment by using one set of knowledge and tools. From the remote office to the data centre, our FAS systems help you collect, distribute and manage data from all locations and applications at the same time.

With NetApp FAS systems, <<ClientShort>> can:

Increase the flexibility of your storage infrastructure

Maintain continuous availability

Boost system utilisation and administrator efficiency

Respond quickly to growth

Increase Flexibility

The ability to support a variety of protocols and storage technologies (CIFS NAS, NFS NAS, iSCSI SAN, Fibre Channel SAN and FCoE SAN) means that <<ClientShort>>’s investments in NetApp unified storage systems can be leveraged over their lifecycle—from consolidating storage in a SAN environment to repurposing for secondary storage or compliance. Because the NetApp platform supports multiple protocols and disk technologies and offers all software capabilities across all platforms, you have tremendous flexibility over the deployment life of your NetApp system.

Fibre ChannelSAN

iSCSISAN

NFS File Services

CIFS FileServices

NetApp FAS and V-Series Unified Storage Systems

Figure 2) Support for multiple protocols.

NetApp unified storage systems consolidate file and block storage on a single system.

Maintain Continuous Availability

Proven reliability features in NetApp hardware and software result in data availability of more than 99.999% across the NetApp installed base. Backup and replication technologies integrated in NetApp Data ONTAP® storage operating system help keep your applications and data continuously available to users.

Speed Backup and Recovery with NetApp Snapshot Technology

NetApp Snapshot® technology provides point-in-time images, enabling nearly instantaneous file-level or full-data-set recovery and reducing backup and recovery times from hours or days to just minutes. Minimal performance overhead makes Snapshot technology uniquely suited for protecting production data. The ability to take up to 255 Snapshot copies per LUN or volume means that they can be taken at short time intervals. Because of increased recovery point precision, <<ClientShort>>’s systems can be back online even faster after an outage.

Figure 3) NetApp Snapshot technology.

Protect more of your data with minimal performance impact and consumption of storage space. You can take a Snapshot copy in less than a second while applications are running, regardless of volume size or level of activity on your NetApp system.

Anadarko Petroleum Corporation uses NetApp Snapshot technology to reduce backup times by 90% and recover 18 times faster. Backups that used to take 28 to 34 hours are now completed in no more than 2.5 hours. Recovery time has been reduced from 72 hours to just 4 hours.

Using NetApp Snapshot technology, the Charlotte, North Carolina, law firm Robinson, Bradshaw and Hinson is able to complete multiple point-in-time backups of its data on the fly with no system drag and no downtime. This enabled them to cut RPO by 96% and reduce RTO from weeks to minutes.

Quickly Recover from Disaster with NetApp SnapMirror

<<ClientShort>> can increase availability and speed disaster recovery with NetApp SnapMirror® software. NetApp uses a single architecture across its entire storage line, which allows block replication across all FAS products regardless of platform, tier or drive type (Fibre Channel, SATA or SAS). NetApp SnapMirror software replicates data (LUNs and NAS volumes) between all NetApp managed systems. The data replicated by SnapMirror is available on the destination storage for offloading to tape backup and read-only data distribution and dissemination.

With SnapMirror, <<ClientShort>> can:

Quickly recover with zero data loss

Set recovery point objectives that range from seconds to minutes to one day

Enable controller-licensed functionality that eliminates recurring costs for the amount of data transferred

Replicate over IP Ethernet (100Mb, 1Gb, 10Gb) and over Fibre Channel

Facilitate incremental replication (after initial full replication of source data) in which only changed data blocks are copied

Enable point-to-point, one-to-many, many-to-one and cascaded replication

Support replication protocols used by WAN optimisation products from Riverbed, Juniper and Cisco

The City of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, implemented a turnkey remote disaster recovery solution based on NetApp SnapMirror. Their IT team was impressed with the performance of SnapMirror after water damage to the dark fibre connection caused a WAN disruption. Moving to the city’s backup wireless connection, the reliable processes of SnapMirror allowed their systems to continue working flawlessly—even when forced to transmit point-to-point wirelessly; bouncing from city hall, off the city’s water tower, to the fire station.

'With NetApp disaster recovery capabilities, Activision can now mirror all of its data and protect its intellectual property in all of its development studios. This is a significant addition to Activision’s overall infrastructure and has allowed us to fully comply with Sarbanes-Oxley requirements.'

— Neil Armstrong, Vice President, Information Technology, Activision

'Because NetApp SnapMirror replicates our image sorting environment, I’m no longer concerned about a single device failure. Total cost of ownership is great for the company, but for me, peace of mind is huge.'

— Mark Tuttle, Senior Manager of Engineering, AutoTrader.com

Boost Utilisation and Efficiency

NetApp FAS systems offer numerous efficiency technologies integrated in the Data ONTAP®

storage operating system to help increase storage utilisation and boost the efficiency of <<ClientShort>>'s system and storage administrators.

Reduce Capacity Requirements with Deduplication

With NetApp deduplication, <<ClientShort>> can store just one copy of each unique data object, substantially reducing capacity requirements. Deduplication automatically removes duplicate data blocks on a 4KB level across an entire volume, reclaiming wasted storage to achieve significant space savings.

Before After

Figure 4) NetApp deduplication removes duplicate data blocks.

NetApp deduplication can be implemented across a wide variety of applications and file types which include:

Data backup

Data archiving

Primary data volumes

Depending on the application and file type, NetApp deduplication can help <<ClientShort>> reclaim up to 95% of storage space.

95%

70%60%

35% 30% 30%25% 25%

10%

0%10%20%30%40%50%60%70%80%90%

100%

Figure 5) Typical space savings with NetApp deduplication.

Atlanta-based Polysius designs and supplies, installs and improves the performance of cement plants. They also design equipment for processing raw material and minerals for such industries as the refractory, lime and chemical markets. Using NetApp deduplication, the company has reduced the size of their data volumes by up to 70%. This capacity savings enabled them to defer additional storage purchases by 6 to 8 months.

SPAR Austria Group, a European retail giant, saved 6TB of storage capacity by using NetApp deduplication. This storage space is now available for flexible usage in other projects—for example, the virtualisation of additional servers.

Speed Testing and Development with flex clone

With NetApp FlexClone® technology, <<ClientShort>> administrators can create instant writable Snapshot copies to support application testing.

Unlike full copies from mirrored production data, FlexClone copies:

Can be created almost instantly

Take very little space

Have negligible performance impact

With FlexClone, you can affordably create as many clones as needed to speed product development.

BBM Canada, a non-profit broadcast research company, uses NetApp FlexClone to enable rapid cloning of Oracle® production databases and VMware® virtual server images for a cost-effective dev/test environment. FlexClone makes exact copies of the database for development and testing. The company can make as many copies as they want, whenever they want

them—a process that previously took 4 days—in under 30 minutes. Programmers now run tests with no impact on production, resulting in better-quality surveys for customers. Cloning data also allows BBM to catch and fix errors before they reach the critical delivery period.

'[Since implementing a NetApp solution], we’ve been able to shave at least 2 days off our promised survey delivery dates, from 9 days down to 7, which has improved the value of our service for our customers.'

— Tom Saint, BBM Canada

Respond Quickly to Growth

With traditional storage provisioning, disk capacity is allocated to applications regardless of how much data is actually being written. Space requirements are rarely known early in a deployment; to make sure that their applications will have adequate capacity, users often present inflated estimates of capacity requirements. This forces administrators to overprovision the larger storage infrastructure.

NetApp FlexVol® thin provisioning helps <<ClientShort>> to:

Avoid costly over-provisioning and reconfiguration typical to other storage solutions

Reduce storage provisioning time from days to minutes

Allocate storage on demand for LUNs and volumes across all protocols (FCP, iSCSI, FCOE and NAS) and operating systems according to application requirements

As your capacity needs evolve, FlexVol volumes can dynamically grow and shrink to meet exactly those needs. As you decrease volumes, their capacity returns to the pool for allocation to other volumes as needed.

Data Stored inDynamic Flexible Volumes

Flexible Volumes(2TB Provisioned)

Aggregate Physical Storage(1TB Total)

RAID Groups

1TB

300GB200GB

200GB 50GB

150GB

100GB

Figure 6) NetApp FlexVol pools physical storage.

Create and resize virtual volumes as your application needs change. By using FlexVol and thin provisioning, you can improve—even double—the utilisation of your existing storage.

The College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York, deployed a shared storage system based on NetApp products and technologies. Their virtual servers are now provisioned in minutes and LUNs are provisioned in seconds without disruption. Before, those actions took weeks and cost up to $20,000. Saint Rose can also provision its storage on the fly and is achieving utilisation rates of 80%–85%—a significant improvement over the 20% they were getting before upgrading to the NetApp system. Saint Rose was able to decommission 30 servers with NetApp which saved energy and space. This freed IT staff from the burden of managing the extra servers.

Using NetApp FlexVol, the Thunderbird School of Global Management cut provisioning time from 3 weeks to 2 minutes. This enables them to be more responsive to changing business demands.

Cisco uses NetApp FlexVol volumes to provision up to 100TB of storage in just 30 minutes, instead of several days. 'The combined thin provisioning savings and deduplication savings from NetApp storage has reduced our power and space footprint for this deployment to date almost 67% over what a traditional deployment would need. It has also freed over half a petabyte of traditional storage that is now being consolidated or reutilised.'

— Rich Harper, ERP storage architect, Storage Services Group, Cisco

Expand Capacity with Disk Shelves

The dense and space-efficient design of NetApp DS4243 disk shelves allow <<ClientShort>> to get the most out of valuable data centre space by expanding storage capacity up to 48TB without increasing footprint. Particularly well-suited for production and high availability environments, the DS4243 offers:

Support for SAS or SATA in 12- or 24-drive configurations

Seamless integration with NetApp Snapshot® and deduplication technologies so you can protect your data with no impact on performance and minimal impact on storage resources

Greater resiliency through features such as:

Secure out-of-band data management

Multiple redundant components

Figure 7) The NetApp DS4243 disk shelf supports up to 24 drives and 48TB of raw capacity in a 4U design with a 3Gb/sec SAS backbone.