Lab Validation Report - NetApp · 2018-09-03 · Lab Validation Report NetApp E-Series Storage Systems ... Lab Validation: NetApp E-Series Storage Systems 3 ... and data center consolidation

Lab Validation Report NetApp E-Series Storage Systems

Performance Efficiency in Consolidated Application-Driven Environments

By Tony Palmer, Senior Lab Analyst

June 2015 © 2015 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Lab Validation: NetApp E-Series Storage Systems 2

© 2015 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Contents

Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 3 Background ............................................................................................................................................................... 3 NetApp E-Series ........................................................................................................................................................ 3

ESG Lab Validation ........................................................................................................................................ 5 Getting Started ......................................................................................................................................................... 5 Mixed Workload Scalability ...................................................................................................................................... 8 Dynamic Disk Pools ................................................................................................................................................. 11

ESG Lab Validation Highlights ..................................................................................................................... 15

Issues to Consider ....................................................................................................................................... 15

The Bigger Truth ......................................................................................................................................... 16

Appendix ..................................................................................................................................................... 17 Virtual Machine and Drive Configuration ............................................................................................................... 17

All trademark names are property of their respective companies. Information contained in this publication has been obtained by sources The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) considers to be reliable but is not warranted by ESG. This publication may contain opinions of ESG, which are subject to change from time to time. This publication is copyrighted by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. Any reproduction or redistribution of this publication, in whole or in part, whether in hard-copy format, electronically, or otherwise to persons not authorized to receive it, without the express consent of The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc., is in violation of U.S. copyright law and will be subject to an action for civil damages and, if applicable, criminal prosecution. Should you have any questions, please contact ESG Client Relations at 508.482.0188.

ESG Lab Reports

The goal of ESG Lab reports is to educate IT professionals about data center technology products for companies of all types and sizes. ESG Lab reports are not meant to replace the evaluation process that should be conducted before making purchasing decisions, but rather to provide insight into these emerging technologies. Our objective is to go over some of the more valuable feature/functions of products, show how they can be used to solve real customer problems and identify any areas needing improvement. ESG Lab's expert third-party perspective is based on our own hands-on testing as well as on interviews with customers who use these products in production environments. This ESG Lab report was sponsored by NetApp.



Introduction

This ESG Lab Validation Report presents the hands-on evaluation and testing results of NetApp E-Series SAN storage systems in an enterprise mixed-workload environment with multiple virtualized servers and applications sharing a consolidated NetApp E-Series storage infrastructure. ESG Lab focused on the performance, scalability, and efficiency of the E-Series platform.

Background

IT managers, line-of-business stakeholders, and senior executives continue to look for ways to improve resource utilization and ROI in IT. In addition, IT is faced with managing a wide variety of projects all deemed important to the business. According to ESG research, a number of these projects involve virtualization technologies, as Figure 1 demonstrates. Increased use of server virtualization, improving backup and recovery, managing data growth (a perennial focus), desktop virtualization, and data center consolidation are all among the top ten most-cited important IT priorities for the next 12 months as reported by ESG survey respondents. These responses indicate that IT is facing increasing pressure to improve efficiency while delivering non-stop application and data access and protection.1

Figure 1. Most Important 2015 IT Priorities

Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, 2015.

NetApp E-Series

NetApp E-Series storage systems are designed to provide terabytes to petabytes of robust, highly available, scalable modular storage. With the E-Series, NetApp set out to build a flexible, modular system to enable custom configurations that can be optimized for a wide variety of applications and scale performance and capacity as needed. The NetApp E-Series offers three types of disk drive/controller shelves, multiple disk and SSD drive types, and host connectivity using quad-lane 12Gb SAS, 10GbE iSCSI, 16GFC, and 56Gb InfiniBand.

1 Source: ESG Research Report, 2015 IT Spending Intentions Survey, February 2015.

22%

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26%

34%

0% 10% 20% 30% 40%

Improving collaboration capabilities

Building a “private cloud” infrastructure

Business continuity/disaster recovery programs

Regulatory compliance initiatives

Using cloud infrastructure services

Desktop virtualization

Increasing use of server virtualization

Managing data growth

Improving data backup and recovery

Information security initiatives

Top 10 most important IT priorities over the next 12 months. (Percent of respondents, N=601, ten responses accepted)

http://www.netapp.com/

http://www.esg-global.com/research-reports/2015-it-spending-intentions-survey/




The NetApp E2700 is aimed at remote office, branch office, and midsized organizations, scaling to 1.2PB of capacity in a single system, while the E5600—scaling to 2.3PB—is designed for larger midmarket and enterprise organizations with more demanding requirements. Both models are designed to reduce data center footprint while supporting I/O-intensive mixed workloads and databases, high-performance file systems, and throughput-intensive streaming applications while maintaining high availability.

NetApp E-Series storage systems run NetApp SANtricity storage management software, which provides advanced storage functionality, including dynamic drive rebalancing, RAID and Dynamic Disk Pool (DDP) management, cache tiering, and extended data protection, including snapshots, remote replication, and disaster recovery.

Figure 2. The NetApp E-Series Portfolio

The NetApp E2700 and E5600 build on the field-proven reliability of the NetApp E-Series architecture, with more than 750,000 storage systems deployed worldwide. Supporting up to 12GB/sec of throughput, the key capabilities of the NetApp E-Series include:

Advanced recovery capabilities, including snapshots and volume copies. Advanced availability capabilities, including dual controllers and remote replication. Dynamic Disk Pools (DDP) data protection technology, designed to simplify traditional RAID management

by distributing data parity information and spare capacity across a large pool of drives. Four native quad-lane 12Gb/sec SAS host interfaces in the E2700, expanding up to eight total interfaces in

the E5600. Up to eight additional 10GbE iSCSI host interfaces. Up to eight additional 16GFC host interfaces. Up to four 56Gb/sec InfiniBand interfaces in the E5600. High-speed SAS, cost-effective nearline SAS, self-encrypting, or solid-state drives—up to 192 drives in the

E2700 and 384 drives in the E5600. Up to 120 SSDs in the E2700 and E5600. 3.5 and 2.5 inch drive enclosures. Up to 16GB of cache in the E2700, up to 24GB of cache in the E5600.

A growing set of application-aware management plug-ins provide tight integration with management tools from Microsoft, VMware, Oracle, and others. Plug-ins simplify the management of E-Series storage with built-in



provisioning, monitoring, event management, and advanced data recovery. Advanced storage functionality is provided in the form of thin provisioning, snapshot technology, VAAI integration, and Dynamic Disk Pools.

ESG Lab Validation

ESG Lab performed hands-on evaluation and testing of the NetApp E-series both remotely and at a NetApp facility in Boulder, Colorado. Testing was designed to examine the real-world performance and seamless scalability of the E-Series platform when shared by multiple virtual servers running a mix of real-world application workloads.

Getting Started

ESG Lab started with a pre-wired test bed as summarized in Figure 3. Two industry-standard x86 servers were connected via 16GFC to one NetApp E5600 Storage System.2 The NetApp E5600 was configured with 84 900GB 10K RPM SAS drives and 12 800GB SSDs, for a total of 96 drives. The servers were configured with VMware vSphere 5.1 with Windows Server 2012 virtual machines installed on each server.

Figure 3. The ESG Lab Test Bed

ESG Lab Testing

In a way, storage system benchmark testing is like an analysis of the performance of a car. Specifications including horsepower and acceleration from zero to 60 are a good first-pass indicator of a car’s performance. But while specifications provide a good starting point, a variety of other factors should be taken into consideration, including the condition of the road, the skill of the driver, and gas mileage ratings. Much like buying a car, a test drive with real-world application traffic is the best way to determine how a storage system will perform in real-world conditions.

ESG Lab performance testing began with an evaluation of low level IOPS and throughput characterization tests of the E-Series platform with a hybrid configuration including SSDs and 10K RPM disks using the open source Iometer

2 Configuration details can be found in the Appendix.



workload generation utility. I/O per second, or IOPS, is a measure of the number of operations that a storage system can perform. When a system is able to deliver a large number of IOPS, it will tend to be able to service more applications and users in parallel. Throughput is an indicator of the available bandwidth and data-moving capabilities of a storage system. Iometer profiles of 4KB random reads and 512KB sequential reads were used for this first-pass analysis of the raw aggregate IOPS and throughput capabilities of the NetApp E-Series platform. Figure 4 shows the IOPS and throughput achieved by the NetApp E5600 SSD/HDD hybrid system in our test bed.

Figure 4. NetApp E5600 Read IOPS and Throughput

To translate these results into a more real-world experience, ESG Lab used the Orion utility from Oracle to generate database traffic. Orion is a lightweight tool that is designed for measuring storage performance, and is intended to help administrators understand the performance capabilities of a storage system running common database application workloads, either to uncover performance issues or to size a new database installation without having to create and run an Oracle database. Orion is typically used to measure two types of database activity: response time-sensitive online transaction processing (OLTP), and bandwidth-intensive online analytic processing (OLAP). Figure 5 depicts the results of the Orion tests run on the hybrid E5600 using just 12 SSD drives.

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Figure 5. NetApp E5600 OLTP and OLAP Performance

The detailed results are presented in Table 1.

Table 1. NetApp E5600 Performance Details

E5600 Disk IOPS and Throughput

NetApp E5600 Workload IOPS Response Time(ms)

Throughput (MB/sec)

Response Time(ms)

IOPS 4KB Random Read 499,144 2.0 N/A N/A

Throughput 512KB Sequential Read N/A N/A 11,727 N/A

IOPS OLTP (8KB I/O) 111,943 0.90 N/A N/A

Throughput OLAP (1MB I/O) N/A N/A 4,167 N/A

What the Numbers Mean

IOPS is a measure of the storage system’s ability to process small, transactional operations. Storage throughput is a measure of the available bandwidth provided by the storage system.

ESG Lab’s testing did not attempt to determine the maximum IOPS that the storage system could sustain; the tests are designed to have poor locality of reference in order to stress the storage system.

ESG Lab confirmed that the E5600 was able to provide 499,144 small block random IOPS as well as throughput of 11.7GB/sec for large block sequential reads. This was accomplished with an average host response time of just 2.0ms, and with just 84 SAS drives, indicating a very efficient storage engine.

Using an Oracle Orion simulation of the disk I/O in real-world database environments, ESG Lab confirmed that the E5600 was able to provide 111,943 IOPS in an OLTP scenario with average response times of just 0.90ms, and 4.17GB/sec throughput in an OLAP scenario.

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Why This Matters

A storage system needs a strong engine and well-designed architecture to perform predictably in a real-world, mixed workload environment. One measure of the strength of a storage controller engine is its maximum IOPS and throughput. ESG Lab confirmed that a NetApp E-Series storage system can sustain more than 499,000 small block random IOPS and an excellent 11.7GB/sec of aggregate large block sequential read throughput. Database performance was excellent as well, sustaining nearly 112,000 OLTP IOPS with sub-millisecond response times.

In ESG Lab’s experience, these are impressive results for a dual controller modular storage system. These results suggest that the E-Series is well-suited for consolidated enterprise environments with highly virtualized servers running demanding transaction processing, mixed workload, and high-bandwidth applications like analytics and backup to disk.

Mixed Workload Scalability

Conventional server benchmarks were designed to measure the performance of a single application running on a single operating system inside a single physical computer. Much like traditional server benchmarks, conventional storage system benchmarks were designed to measure the performance of a single storage system running a single application workload. The SPC-1 benchmark, developed and managed by the Storage Performance Council, is a great example of a traditional storage benchmark. SPC-1 was designed to assess the performance capabilities of a single storage system as it services the workload of a single online interactive database application. As exemplified in these business-critical database applications, SPC-1 generates random I/O, simulating queries and updates.

Traditional benchmarks running a single application workload can't help IT understand what happens when a mix of applications is deployed on shared storage in a virtual server environment.

ESG Lab storage-focused benchmarking uses multiple servers attached to a single storage system. Rather than running application-level benchmarks, which stress the CPU and memory of the server, lower level industry-standard benchmarks are used with a goal of measuring the maximum mixed workload capabilities of a single storage system. Industry-standard tools were used to emulate the I/O activity of four common business-critical application workloads:

Database: The Orion utility from Oracle was used to generate database traffic. Orion was designed to help administrators understand the performance capabilities of a storage system for databases without having to create and run an Oracle database. Orion is typically used to measure two types of database activity: response time-sensitive online transaction processing (OLTP) and bandwidth-intensive online analytic processing (OLAP).

File Services: The industry-standard Iometer utility was used to emulate the I/O activity of typical corporate users accessing file shares. This I/O characterization was composed of a variety of 100% random accesses, weighted 80% reads and 20% writes, using a mix of 4KB, 8KB, 16KB, 32KB, and 64KB block sizes. The file services Iometer profile used for this test was originally distributed by Intel, the author of Iometer. Iometer has since become an open source project.3

Backup Restore: The industry-standard Iometer utility was used to simulate the traffic for the restoration of files from a backup. The I/O characterization was composed of 100% sequential, 100% write, and 64KB I/O. With this I/O profile, throughput is the important metric.

Media Player: The industry-standard Iometer utility was used to generate simulated user activity of streaming media playback from the storage system. The I/O characterization was composed of 100% sequential, 100% read, and 32KB I/O. With this I/O profile, throughput is the important metric.

All tests were performed on Windows physical drives running over VMware VMDK devices.

3 http://sourceforge.net/projects/iometer/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/iometer/



ESG Lab Testing

ESG Lab next measured mixed workload performance by generating four application workloads on four virtual machines then scaling to eight workloads on eight virtual machines. With a mix of random and sequential, plus read and write I/O, the goal was not to record the largest IOPS number possible, but to make an assessment of the ability of the NetApp E-Series to perform as an increasing number of applications are consolidated onto a single storage system. The scalability of mixed workload activity is illustrated in Figure 6.

Figure 6. NetApp E-Series Mixed Workload Scaling

As shown in Figure 6, performance scaled nearly linearly as application workloads were brought online, with response time staying nearly flat. The detailed results, including the Orion OLAP throughput results, are presented in Table 2.

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4 Workers 8 Workers

Ave

rage

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ime

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IOP

S

OLTP Backup Restore Media Player File Server Avg. Resp. Time



Table 2. NetApp E-Series Performance Details

Four Workers Eight Workers

NetApp E-Series Performance Response Time

(ms) Performance

Response Time (ms)

OLTP 54,166 IOPS 0.92 108,953 IOPS 0.92

OLAP 1,378 MBps N/A 2,766 MBps N/A

Backup Restore 22,838 IOPS 1,497 MBps

2.80 46,200 IOPS 3,028 MBps

2.77

Media Player 18,709 IOPS 613 MBps

1.71 58,442 IOPS 1,915 MBps

1.25

File Server 1,813 IOPS 35.28 3,524 IOPS 36.33

Average Response Time

N/A 10.18 N/A 10.32

IOPS per Drive 1,355 N/A 3,016 N/A

What the Numbers Mean

ESG Lab’s mixed workload testing did not attempt to determine the maximum throughput or IOPS that the storage system can sustain; the tests are designed to have poor locality of reference in order to stress the storage system.

The workload represents a typical mix seen in many enterprise environments. Actual performance may be different based on the specific characteristics of the applications and environment. Better locality of reference, for example, would facilitate higher cache hit rates and better performance.

The NetApp E-Series scaled smoothly from four to eight application workloads and supported a mixed virtualized environment with OLTP database, OLAP database, file services, streaming media player, and backup simulations while average response time at the host stayed nearly flat, which suggests that the system has reserves to scale further.

The NetApp E-Series delivered consistently high IOPS per drive as workloads and drives were added.

Why This Matters

ESG research indicates that desktop and server virtualization are among the most-cited IT priorities for the organizations surveyed by ESG.4 Predictable performance scalability is a critical concern when multiple systems running diverse applications share a storage system. A burst of I/O activity in one application can lead to poor response times and lost productivity for other users. A highly virtualized server environment presents one of the most diverse and challenging mixes of application types and I/O access patterns to a storage system.

It’s a significant challenge for IT to meet service level requirements for business-critical applications, especially for I/O-intensive OLTP and e-mail deployments with strict response time requirements.

NetApp E-Series storage systems offer consistently scalable performance with low response times in the mixed workload scenarios typical of many of today’s virtualized enterprise environments. ESG Lab testing has validated that as a growing number of applications are consolidated in a virtual server environment, the balanced performance of the NetApp E-Series scales. The performance scaling is consistent and predictable, allowing IT to plan and grow the storage environment as the business needs change.






Dynamic Disk Pools

NetApp Dynamic Disk Pools (DDP) is a data protection scheme designed to provide greater simplicity, flexibility, and availability than traditional RAID. DDP distributes data, parity information, and spare capacity across a pool of drives, defining which drives are used for segment placement to ensure data is fully protected. Disk Pools can be flexibly sized from 11 to 384 drives to provide optimal utilization of virtually any configuration. DDP is designed to deliver and maintain high performance while recovering from a drive failure.

Figure 7 shows how a 24-disk storage system might be laid out using traditional RAID. Although traditional RAID can protect against single or double drive failures, and utilize hot spares to facilitate rebuilds of failed drives without waiting for a replacement, there are tradeoffs with traditional RAID.

Figure 7. Traditional RAID Group Layout

As seen in Figure 7, traditional RAID requires an administrator to allocate drives to RAID groups and designate dedicated drives as hot spares, which sit idle until invoked after a drive failure. In the case of a drive failure, the remaining drives in a RAID group must rebuild the data from the failed drive while performing application I/O. This process can take many hours to days, depending on the size of the drives and the activity of the servers accessing volumes in the RAID group.

With DDP, all disks are utilized in a pool, with volumes spread across all drives on a random 10-drive (8+2) per segment basis, as shown in Figure 8. Note that the spare capacity on each drive is available for allocation into a new pool or for use in a rebuild of a failed drive. Essentially, every disk in a pool is a “hot spare” and all disks share in the rebuild. Another benefit of DDP is that only actual volume data needs to be rebuilt after a drive failure.



Figure 8. NetApp Dynamic Disk Pool Layout

ESG Lab Testing

Previously, ESG Lab tested a NetApp E-Series Array configured with DDP and traditional RAID. The traditional RAID configuration contained a mix of RAID5, RAID1, and RAID10 volumes, based on application best practices. The DDP configuration had 48 drives in a single Dynamic Disk Pool, with all application volumes carved from that single pool. The allocated capacity and volume sizes were identical for both configurations.

Figure 9. Performance Impact of Dynamic Disk Pools

As seen in Figure 9, performance was nearly identical, with less than 100 IOPS separating the performance of the two configurations.

ESG Lab simulated a drive failure during production hours by running a two-hour Jetstress Exchange simulation for 18,500 mailboxes and an Oracle OLAP workload while pulling a drive. Figure 10 shows the mixed storage workload

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being generated by the virtual machines from the vSphere console. It’s important to note that the Exchange workload stayed stable even when the OLAP workload kicked off with large block sequential I/O.

Figure 10. VMware vSphere Performance Graph

As seen in Figure 11, performance for DDP was virtually unaffected, with response time increasing by just 4.9%. Meanwhile, the RAID failed drive recovery resulted in a 9.1% increase in response time.

Figure 11. Dynamic Disk Pool Failed Drive Recovery Impact

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RAID DDP RAID Response Time DDP Response Time



As seen in Table 3, the failed drive recovery completed within two hours using DDP, but took nearly five hours in a traditional RAID group.

Table 3. NetApp Exchange Failed Drive Recovery Impact with Dynamic Disk Pools

Mailboxes Response Time

Normal Operation

Failed Drive Recovery

Normal Operation

Failed Drive Recovery

% Change

E-Series (48 Drives) DDP

18,500 18,500 18.7 19.7 4.9%

E-Series (48 Drives) RAID

18,500 18,500 17.1 18.7 9.1%

Traditional RAID Dynamic Disk Pools

900 GB Failed Disk Recovery Time

5 Hours 2 Hours

Why This Matters

According to ESG research, managing data growth and increasing use of virtualization are three of the top five most-cited IT priorities for survey respondents in 2015.5 These and other top priorities, such as improving data backup and recovery, and business continuity and disaster recovery programs, are all heavily impacted by data outages. Since lack of application availability can result in missed business opportunities, reduced productivity, lost revenue, dissatisfied customers, damage to the company’s reputation, and even legal liability, it follows that maintaining uptime and data access are crucial for business productivity.

Global operations demand 24x7 data access, leaving no window for planned or unplanned downtime. Server and storage consolidation magnify the need for high availability and reliability because a hardware outage will affect many systems and applications, not just one.

ESG Lab confirmed that NetApp Dynamic Disk Pools implemented in NetApp E-Series arrays were able to provide the same level of small block, random IOPS as a more traditional RAID configuration. ESG Lab also validated DDP’s ability to substantially reduce both response times and failed drive recovery times.






ESG Lab Validation Highlights

ESG Lab confirmed that a hybrid NetApp E5600 storage system with 84 10K RPM SAS and 12 SSD drives was able to sustain an excellent 11.7GB/sec of aggregate large block throughput.

The same hybrid NetApp E5600 system was able to deliver more than 499,000 small block random IOPS with the same complement of 10K RPM SAS and SSD drives.

The NetApp E5600 delivered consistently high IOPS per drive as workloads and drives were added, demonstrating efficient utilization of back-end storage to satisfy application demands.

ESG Lab testing has validated that the balanced performance of the NetApp E-Series scaled predictably as a growing number of applications were consolidated in a virtual server environment.

ESG Lab confirmed that NetApp Dynamic Disk Pools were able to combine the same level of small block, random IOPS as a more traditional RAID configuration with the ability to substantially reduce disk rebuild times.

Issues to Consider

Generally accepted best practices and predominantly default VMware and NetApp E-Series settings were used during the design of this test. As expected after any benchmark of this magnitude, deep analysis of the results indicates that tuning would probably yield slighter higher absolute results. Given that the goal of this test was not to generate a the largest numbers possible, ESG Lab is confident that the results presented in this report meet the objective of estimating performance scalability and responsiveness as a growing number of virtual machines share a consolidated pool of NetApp E-Series storage.

The test results/data presented in this document are based on industry-standard benchmarks deployed together in a controlled environment. Due to the many variables in each production data center environment, it is still important to perform capacity planning and testing in your own environment to validate a storage system configuration.



The Bigger Truth

Server virtualization is being deployed by a growing number of organizations to lower costs, improve resource utilization, provide non-disruptive upgrades, and increase availability. Each benefit is fundamentally enabled by de-coupling servers, applications, and data from specific physical assets. Storage virtualization takes those very same benefits and extends them from servers to the underlying storage domain—bringing IT organizations one step closer to the ideal of a completely virtualized IT infrastructure.

While the benefits of a completely virtualized infrastructure are obvious to most IT managers, performance and manageability are real concerns. Server, storage, and application administrators are looking for answers to a number of questions:

Can we meet performance service level agreements for a mix of business-critical applications? Does the storage system have the horsepower to serve mixed real-world applications? Can the storage system scale to accommodate future growth and consolidation?

The NetApp E-Series, with up to 2.3PB of high-bandwidth back-end storage capacity and a flexible mix of next-generation 12Gb/sec SAS, 10GbE iSCSI, 16GFC, and 56Gb/sec InfiniBand host connectivity options is ideally suited for consolidation and virtualization in medium-sized businesses, mid-range enterprise environments, and remote sites.

ESG Lab confirmed that the performance and scalability of the NetApp E-Series is well-suited for a mix of applications running in a consolidated enterprise virtual server environment. The hybrid NetApp E5600 was able to deliver 499,144 4KB read IOPS with 2.0ms response times and 11.7GB/sec of streaming throughput. When presented with a more real-world workload, the E5600 supported 111,943 8KB database I/Os per second with sub-millisecond average response times and 4.17GB/sec of throughput for online analytics. These results demonstrate the suitability of the E-Series platform for demanding enterprise environments with a wide variety of business-critical workloads.

ESG Lab confirmed that the growing family of freely available NetApp E-Series application-aware plug-ins can be used to provision and manage data and storage from an application perspective. The VMware vCenter plug-in makes it easy to monitor and provision storage from a VMware virtual server administration console. The site recovery adapter for VMware site recovery manager makes is easy to define, automate, and test the remote recovery of applications running in virtual machines. Management framework plug-ins for Oracle Enterprise Manager and Microsoft System Center Operation Manager (SCOM) make it easy to monitor and manage storage from an infrastructure level. These capabilities, along with a growing family of application-specific snapshot and cluster failover tools, can be used to simplify storage management using a single pane of glass that administrators are familiar with.

ESG Lab is pleased to report that the NetApp E-Series delivers simple, efficient, consistently high performance, modular flexibility, and high density along with advanced functionality—thin provisioning, enhanced snapshots, VAAI support, and Dynamic Disk Pools. NetApp E-Series is clearly well-suited to support a mix of demanding real-world business applications running in a highly consolidated virtual server infrastructure; it’s modular enough for midmarket organizations, and scalable enough for the enterprise.



Appendix

Table 4. Test Bed Overview

Storage

NetApp E5600 84 900GB 10K SAS drives 12 800GB SSDs 16GFC host connect

Servers

Two Dell R720 servers Dual hex-core Intel E5-2420 processors, 48 GB of RAM

Host Bus Adapters

16GFC Dual-port HBA

Virtualization Software and Guest Operating Systems Server Virtualization VMware vSphere ESXi 5.1

Guest OS Windows Server 2012 64 bit

Virtual Machine and Drive Configuration

NetApp E-Series disk capacity was used for all storage capacity including VMware virtual disk files (VMDK), Windows Server 2012 operating system images, application executables, and application data. The operating system images were installed on VMDK volumes.

Application data and log volumes were configured as RAID-1 volumes. Guest operating system volumes were configured using RAID-6 volumes. Volume ownership was balanced across the dual controllers and distributed evenly over the six host interfaces. The volumes were spread evenly over two VMware host groups with a multipath policy of most recently used (MRU).



Table 5. Benchmark Utilities/Workload Generators

Characterization Iometer, version 2006.07.27 Dynamo clients ran within eight guest VMs running on two Dell R720 servers with Windows Server 2012 as the guest operating system. Eight SAS HDD-based RAID 6 (8 + 2) LUNs and two SAS SSD-based RAID 5 (11 + 1) LUNS were tested. Each of the LUNs was tested as a physical drive over raw device mapped volumes in a VMware vSphere environment (ESX 5.1). The servers worked in parallel, accessing the NetApp E5600 systems through four FC interfaces negotiated at 16GFC. Maximum throughput was measured using 512KB sequential reads. Two workers, sixteen outstanding I/Os per physical drive.

Database Workload Generator Oracle Orion, version 10.2.0.1.0 • Small I/O size: 8KB

• Large I/O size: 1024 KB

• I/O Types: Small Random, Large Random • Simulated Array Type: RAID 0

• Num_disks: 1 per instance

• Stripe Depth: 1024KB

• Write: 30%

• Duration for each Data Point: 150 seconds

File Server Iometer, version 1.1.0 Four workers, four outstanding I/Os per physical drive 100% random, 80% reads, 20% writes 64% 4KB blocks 6% 8KB blocks 8% 16KB blocks 8% 32KB blocks 14% 64KB blocks

Backup Restore Iometer, version 1.1.0 One worker, one outstanding I/O per physical drive 100% sequential writes, 64KB block size

Media Player Iometer, version 1.1.0 One worker, one outstanding I/O per physical drive 100% sequential reads, 32KB block size

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Lab Validation Report - NetApp · 2018-09-03 · Lab Validation Report NetApp E-Series Storage Systems ... Lab Validation: NetApp E-Series Storage Systems 3 ... and data center consolidation