Shulou(Shulou.com)06/01 Report--

This article shows you an example analysis of EMC high-end storage and NETAPP's ONTAP cluster, which is concise and easy to understand. I hope you can get something through the detailed introduction of this article.

Traditional high-end storage generally uses PCIe or RapidIO high-speed network to interconnect multiple nodes into a whole to form a multi-control system. And many mid-range storage manufacturers interconnect multiple mid-range storage by means of cluster through 10GE network, which also forms a multi-control system.

So what's the difference between the two architectures? Can the mid-range system of the cluster architecture also be called high-end storage?

For the traditional high-end storage architecture, we choose EMC as the representative, while for the mid-range cluster architecture, we choose NETAPP ONTAP cluster mode as the representative. Let's take a look at how EMC sees this.

NETAPP said that its ONTAP cluster has four main characteristics:

Unified platform that supports both SAN and NAS

Online operation, hardware maintenance and update, uninterrupted business

Verified user load, more than 20 application deployment wizards

Almost unlimited scalability, the maximum volume can support 20PB, and the maximum cluster can support 65PB

How does EMC respond to the challenge of NETAPP?

1. EMC believes that NETAPP's cluster architecture is not a true enterprise scale-out architecture, because NETAPP resources need to be bound to some FAS nodes of the cluster architecture, resulting in isolated islands of performance and capacity. Watermelon understands that EMC believes that the data resources of the NETAPP cluster are owned, so the load between nodes can not be completely balanced, resulting in some nodes being busy and some nodes idle, and the switching of nodes also has an impact on the business.

EMC believes that VMAX is the true enterprise-class five-nine scale-out architecture. Because it has the following three features that NETAPP does not have:

Real AA dual-active architecture, the data does not belong to some engines

Dynamic resource allocation

Zero downtime, system upgrades and failures have little impact on system performance

2. EMC also believes that the Virtual Storage Tiering "(VST) provided by Netapp is not really hierarchical storage. VST includes FlashCache and FlashPool. FlashCache uses PCIE flash memory cards on the controller to improve read performance, while FlashPool uses SSD to improve read and write performance. Neither of these methods is really layered, because the media cannot be fully utilized without data movement.

The FAST VP of EMC can be automatically layered, which greatly reduces the management workload and improves the return on investment of SSD.

3. At best, EMC also believes that EMC VMAX uses controller encryption, linear encryption, and supports all media. On the other hand, NETAP uses disk encryption, which requires a special hard disk, which is expensive and requires external key management software.

These are the three main points of EMC's main attack on NETAPP. From a structural point of view, it is mainly the first point. If the NETAPP cluster mode can achieve that the data does not belong in the future, can it also be called high-end storage?

The above is an example analysis of EMC high-end storage and NETAPP's ONTAP cluster. Have you learned any knowledge or skills? If you want to learn more skills or enrich your knowledge reserve, you are welcome to follow the industry information channel.

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