NetApp's back, baby, flaunting new tech and Azure cloud swagger

There's a new energy at NetApp. The Microsoft Azure NFS deal was a great confidence booster, and the two recent acquisitions of Greenqloud and Plexistor provide stepping stones to a high-performance, on-premises storage future and a stronger hybrid cloud play. We were briefed at NetApp Insight in Berlin by co-founder Dave Hitz …

[Solarflare]

"NetApp's back, baby"

Considering this is the 4th day on the run of articles about NetApp and there was another one at the start of the month, it's starting to feel as if it has always been here. I'm half expecting to see "The Register, part of the NetApp Group" soon based off of the recent swooning...

[INOV8ER]

The coverage is driven by NetApp's Yearly conference "Insight: in Berlin,

Many announcements and interviews happening this week.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah

Yeah, and anything AWS. Whilst (as usual) laying the boots into Apple, DXC, IBM, Oracle etc

[Secta_Protecta]

It looks to me like some good decisions have (finally) been made after a run of questionable ones. Good luck to NetApp, I've always liked working with their products and the new HCI kit looks pretty impressive too.

[anw]

Great to see NetApp on the up

I don't know what's more impressive?

Kurian changing the fortunes of NetApp or the happy pills Melllor seems to be taking ;)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Great to see NetApp on the up

Mellor does love his netapp

[Anonymous Coward]

Somewhere in the middle

It wasn’t but a short while ago that NetApp could do no right.

Now the opposite is in play but the reality is the truth is always somewhere in the middle.

The next company that will bear the wrath of the storage market will be Dell. In fact, George Kurian should send a thank you note to Michael Dell.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Somewhere in the middle

I spoke with Gartner the other day and they are recommending all EMC customers to hold off purchasing anything new from Dell/EMC until they have figured out their product portfolio. Too much risk.

Dell/EMC storage numbers are allegedly down 50% for some products due to this and other factors. It might also be possible that the analysts' recommendation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: because customers wait, DEMC kills certain products, which makes customers wait more, which ...

Kudos to NetApp and Kurian, great job.

[CheesyTheClown]

What are they claiming?

So, the performance and latency numbers are on the pretty damn slow side. Probably still bottlenecks associated with using Data OnTap which is famously slow. Azure has consistently shown far better storage performance number than this in the Storage Spaces Direct configuration.

I have seen far better numbers on MariaDB using storage spaces direct in the lab as well. With a properly configured RDMA solution for SMB3 in the back end, there is generally between 80 and 320gb/s back end performance. This is substantially better than any NVMe configuration mainly because NVMe channels are so small in comparison. Of course, the obscene amount of waste in the NVMe protocol adds to that as well. NVMe is only well suited for direct to device attachment. By routing it through a fabric, it severely hurts storage latency and increases chances for errors which aren’t present when using PCIe as designed.

Overall, it’s almost always better to use MariaDB scaled on Hyper-V with paravirtualized storage drivers then to do silly things like running it virtualized over NFS. In fact, you will see far better numbers on proper Windows technologies than by using legacy storage systems like this.

I think the main issue here is that Microsoft didn’t want to deal with customers who absolutely insist on doing thing wrong. So they bought a SAN and just said... “Let NetApp deal with these guys. We’ll manage customers who have actual technical skills, NetApp can have the customers who think virtual servers are smart”.