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Future-proof Your Enterprise

Application Deployments

NetApp FlexPod Select with Veritas

InfoScale Enterprise Delivers State of

the Art Technology

Customer benefits from cost, function, feature

synergies through converged infrastructure solution

This report was developed by Edison Group, Inc. with NetApp/Veritas assistance and

funding. This report may utilize information, including publicly available data,

provided by various companies and sources, including NetApp/Veritas. The opinions

are those of Edison Group, Inc. and do not necessarily represent NetApp/Veritas’s

position.

Printed in the United States of America.

Edison Group, Inc. New York. Edison Group offers no warranty either

expressed or implied on the information contained herein and shall be held harmless for

errors resulting from its use.

All products are trademarks of their respective owners.

First Publication: August, 2016

Produced by: Harold Kreitzman, Analyst; Barry Cohen, Chief Analyst and Editor-in-

Chief; Manny Frishberg, Editor

Table of Contents

Executive Summary ..................................................................................................................... 1

NetApp FlexPod Select with Veritas InfoScale Enterprise ............................................. 1

Emerging Business Market Impact ........................................................................................... 2

3rd Platform ................................................................................................................................. 2

Business/IT Drivers ................................................................................................................... 2

More Complex Application Stack ....................................................................................... 2

Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery ............................................................................. 3

Greater Need for Increased Performance .......................................................................... 3

Single-Pane-of-Glass ............................................................................................................. 4

Automated Operations ......................................................................................................... 4

Decreased Data Center Space Requirement ...................................................................... 4

Converged System Architecture ................................................................................................ 5

Business/IT Key Performance Indicators ................................................................................ 6

Ability to React Quickly to Changing Market Conditions .................................................. 6

Future Proof IT Investment ..................................................................................................... 6

Maintain Service Levels ........................................................................................................... 7

Reduced Infrastructure Costs .................................................................................................. 7

Reduces OPEX ....................................................................................................................... 7

Reduces CAPEX .................................................................................................................... 8

Functions and Features ............................................................................................................... 9

Enterprise Grade Storage System ........................................................................................... 9

SANtricity ................................................................................................................................ 11

NetApp SANtricity DDP ....................................................................................................... 11

Auto Support (ASUP) ............................................................................................................. 12

Veritas InfoScale Enterprise ................................................................................................... 12

Veritas Volume Replicator ................................................................................................. 12

Flexible Storage Sharing ..................................................................................................... 13

Dynamic Multi-Pathing (DMP) ......................................................................................... 13

Smart Tier ............................................................................................................................. 13

Oracle Disk Manager (ODM) ............................................................................................ 14

Deduplication/Compression/Thin Provisioning ............................................................ 14

Cluster File System (CFS) ................................................................................................... 14

InfoScale Availability ......................................................................................................... 15

Veritas InfoScale Operations Manager (VIOM) .............................................................. 15

Cisco Unified Computing System ........................................................................................ 15

Cisco Nexus 5000 .................................................................................................................... 16

Conclusions ................................................................................................................................. 17

Executive Summary

This paper focuses on how combining NetApp's FlexPod Select Converged solutions

with Veritas' InfoScale Enterprise produces an

infrastructure solution to address these key

business concerns:

Ability to React Quickly to Changing Market

Conditions

Future Proof IT Investment

Maintain Service Levels

Reduced Infrastructure Costs

By offering the customer the NetApp/Veritas combined solution, they realize the full

benefits of one of the most technologically advanced Converged Infrastructure systems

available in the market today.

NetApp FlexPod Select with

Veritas InfoScale Enterprise

Customers receive the full

benefits of one of the most

technologically advanced

Converged Infrastructure

systems in the market today.

Edison: NetApp FlexPod Select w/Veritas InfoScale Enterprise 2

Emerging Business Market Impact

First, review the emerging market conditions that are the drivers setting the direction for

design and performance.

Second, see the business impact of the combined NetApp FlexPod Select Converged

Infrastructure with Veritas' InfoScale Enterprise Storage system offering.

3rd Platform

In 2014, IDC presented their view of the evolution of the IT industry, from the “second

platform” representing PC and client-server based infrastructure, to the “third platform”

of innovations driven by emerging big data/analytics, cloud, mobile and social business

applications1.

IDC projected that this third platform will drive business growth and IT responses for

the next 20 years. Two years later, it is quite evident that this prediction is being borne

out, with a significant effect on business and IT decisions.

Strategically minded technology manufacturers are recognizing this change in the

marketplace as defined by the IT and business drivers listed below.

This report demonstrates that NetApp’s FlexPod Select with Veritas InfoScale Enterprise

is a powerful datacenter solution addressing the business drivers for new and emerging

business requirements.

Business/IT Drivers

There are a number of market drivers which have influenced the NetApp FlexPod

Select/Veritas InfoScale Enterprise roadmap.

More Complex Application Stack

Emerging applications like OpenStack, big data, analytics, and hybrid cloud are

increasing application stack management complexity. While there is no such thing as

one-size-fits-all, technology manufacturers must factor the varied workload

requirements into their datacenter solutions.

1 https://www.idc.com/IDC_50anniversary/download/IDC50thAnniversary.pdf


NetApp FlexPod Select with Veritas InfoScale Enterprise solution:

Accommodates Oracle and other leading DB integration, providing strong

performance and availability.

Provides a flexible infrastructure via implementation and management of highly

available, real application clusters (RAC), databases with Veritas InfoScale

Enterprise cluster management for increased flexibility, scalability, and performance.

Enhances ability to react quickly to changing business demands, as it is able to

support changing application workload stacks. Currently supports a large number of

application stacks.

Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery

Competitive pressures and customer expectations for continuous business operations

are at their highest. That translates in the need to design infrastructure and acquire

system components that minimize or eliminate disruptions. In addition, the

safeguarding of data, and the ability to recover business operations quickly when

outages occur, are critical to the health of the business.


Provides business data protection by encrypting data and supporting business

continuity/high availability by it remote mirroring capability.

Greater Need for Increased Performance

Emerging business practices, like big data and data analytics, are aggressively pushing

the performance capabilities of existing infrastructure and the systems. Technology

manufacturers must plan for the future by designing systems and components that can

scale without performance degradation. In addition, new methodologies are needed to

extend the processing, storage and communication capabilities.


Achieves performance service levels through improved database performance via

enhanced file management and disk I/O.

Fully Redundant OLTP 4x Performance, 20 Percent Cost of Tier1 SAN2.

2

https://www.carahsoft.com/application/files/7714/4734/3054/Data_Flexibility_Storage_Sharing_Data_Sheet.p

df


Fully Redundant DW Reduces Query Times by 50 Percent, Completes 5x Queries Per

Hour at 11 Percent Cost of Tier1 SAN.

Single-Pane-of-Glass

One of the most critical technology selection criteria is simplicity as reflected in the

single-pane-of-glass technology resource management. Centralized management is a

must have operations management feature. Technology manufacturers must design

their system components to integrate seamlessly with other manufacturer components,

enabling centralized management.


Centralizes operation management providing automation, orchestration,

monitoring, analytics and configuration management.

Automated Operations

As the systems become more complex and the administrative and operational support

requirements increase, it is necessary to automate manual tasks to promote effective and

efficient system resource management. To put it simply, the time and personnel to

manage the systems at the appropriate level manually is cost prohibitive.


Maintains high service levels through its Auto Support feature which reduces

manual support efforts by automatically providing NetApp technical support with

periodic and as needed actionable reports.

Decreased Data Center Space Requirement

As the cost of infrastructure, i.e., facility, power, and AC continues to increase, the need

to reduce the system infrastructure footprint and environmental impact are key drivers

of manufacturer design and customer selection.


Reduces space requirement due to sophisticated storage reduction methodologies

and a converged architecture footprint designed to reduce space, as well as other

facility-related resources.


Converged System Architecture

The following table delineates the hardware, software, network and storage components

that make up NetApp FlexPod Select with Veritas InfoScale Enterprise validated

converged architecture. NetApp has verified that Veritas InfoScale Enterprise with

NetApp FlexPod Select delivers essential functionality and a variety of management

capabilities, including automation and orchestration, monitoring and analytics, and

configuration management.

The following NetApp FlexPod Select architecture with Veritas InfoScale Enterprise

software was jointly tested by NetApp and Veritas in NetApp’s labs. This test verified

business advantages of converged hardware, software, network, and management

components. The importance from a business perspective is that all components are

fully integrated and tested to take advantage of the best characteristics of each, thus

enabling synergies that result in improved performance and faster delivery.

NetApp FlexPod Select with

Veritas InfoScale Enterprise Description

Chassis Cisco 5108 B-series Blade Chassis

Desktop Servers Cisco B200 M3 blades - 2 Intel Xeon E5-2650 v2 processors and 128GB RAM

NW Switches Cisco Nexus 5548UP; Cisco 8Gb Fibre Channel SFP

NW Cards/Connectors Cisco Fabric Interconnect 6248UP

OS Oracle Linux

Compute Cisco UCS Manager

Network Cisco Nexus NX-OS

Application SW Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC)

Database Oracle Database 12c Enterprise Edition

Storage NetApp EF560 dual controller array

NetApp 16Gb Fibre Channel host interface card

NetApp 400GB SSD

System/NW/Storage Mgt Veritas™ InfoScale Enterprise 7.1

Table 1 – NetApp/Veritas Configuration

The test validated key performance indicators (KPI) that are significant to IT operations

servicing key business demands within SLA requirements.


Business/IT Key Performance Indicators

Strategically driven business/IT executives monitor business success through a series of

KPIs that are linked directly to their short-term, mid-term, and long-term

business/operational objectives. The following summarizes how NetApp FlexPod

Select/Veritas InfoScale Enterprise Solution links to the most common KPIs:

Ability to React Quickly to Changing Market Conditions




Ability to React Quickly to Changing Market Conditions

It has been demonstrated that a converged architecture improves performance,

flexibility, and agility providing an infrastructure that can easily accommodate changing

business requirements.

As presented in more detail below, this solution supports a broad array of workloads,

assuring that as business requirements change it is more than likely that the existing

platform can support changing workload mix.


Some of the functions and features protect customer investments by easily integrating

SAN and NAS together using virtualized pooling. This protects existing investments

while making it possible to add new technology to take advantage of performance

advancements.

As needed, the NetApp FlexPod Select with Veritas InfoScale Enterprise solution scales

up and out independently providing maximum growth potential. It also integrates

easily with industry leading IT vendor system components. For example, Oracle EM

plug-in makes it easy to integrate with industry leading databases.

Functional design enables the transparent introduction of emerging technology without

significant retooling or business disruption.


Flexible architecture non-disruptively extensible to new compute and capacity demands.

Leading edge cluster software is also present to enable system growth without need for

replacement.

The system was designed to anticipate storage growth, as it can support large capacity

flash drives.


Several functions take advantage of the various storage technologies and uniquely

designed storage resource management methodologies to maintain high performance

levels regardless of workload type or storage footprint size.

A recent SPC Benchmark (SPC-2) Study3, April 29, 2016, was conducted where NetApp

EF560 All-Flash Array was determined to be Number One in terms of Price-Performance

relative to many of their competitors.

Business continuity considerations are taken into account in many of the functions and

features of the storage system. For example, the likelihood of storage component failure

is factored into many of the methodologies to assure high performance without failure.

Highly Efficient/Effective Disaster Recovery: faster disk rebuild times than traditional

RAID methodologies shortens business outage timeframes.


High production volumes, efficient internal engineering and manufacturing, and the

decreasing technology prices have enabled NetApp's FlexPod Select converged solutions

with Veritas' InfoScale Enterprise to maintain a more than competitively priced offering.

Reduces OPEX

There are several functions including auto support that reduce the manual effort and

associated OPEX needed to support the storage system. Technical support is

automatically contacted when needed.

3 http://www.storageperformance.org/benchmark_results_files/SPC-2/NetApp/B00078_NetApp_EF560_All-

Flash-Array/b00078_NetApp_EF560_All-Flash-Array_SPC-1_executive-summary.pdf


Reduces CAPEX

Many of the storage resource functions designed to preserve, protect, and extend the life

of the storage system are automated.

Through a combination of traditional storage management techniques like

deduplication/compression/thin provisioning, and unique, patented methodologies, the

combination of NetApp/Veritas functions free up to 80 percent of the storage required

without these functions, reducing capital expenditures.


Functions and Features

The combination of NetApp FlexPod Select with Veritas InfoScale Enterprise and Cisco

functions and features are explored in detail. Not only do the traditional functions

support storage resource management, the addition of Veritas InfoScale Enterprise

creates system synergies that make this an easy-to-administer, and efficient semi-

automated storage management platform that delivers high value.

Enterprise Grade Storage System

When the EF series was first architected, backplane and throughput was engineered for

anticipated higher speeds. In one test, NetApp put in an older controller and did not

experience any degradation in performance.

According to one NetApp engineer, “EF series has been over designed for years. EF was

just waiting for flash.”

Over the years there have been a lot of improvements to the code. This makes it possible

to easily accommodate the storage media evolution and maximize performance.

Specific features include, but are not limited to:

Ability to React Quickly to Changing Market Conditions – Large Number of

Supported Workloads. E5600 was designed with NetApp® SANtricity® OS

adaptive caching algorithms, which address a large range of application workloads:

o Retail points of sale

o Web servers

o Billing systems

o Databases/data warehouses

o Collaboration environments

o Media applications

o Sporting events

o Surveillance

o Research

o Backup

o HPC

Future Proof IT Investment – Infrastructure Design Flexible – Direct attach or SAN

– all functions/features work under both scenarios

Designed to be Integrated with Industry Leading Databases – Oracle EM plug-in;

storage foundation; enterprise manager integration


Maintain Service Levels – as demonstrated by being able to sustain 12 GB/s to disk

and up to 825,000 IOPS. And >99.999 percent availability due to fully redundant I/O

paths, advanced data protection features, and extensive diagnostic capabilities.

Reduced Infrastructure Costs – EF Series Hardware is competitively priced. When

coupled with functions and features, it delivers high value when compared to like

storage systems.

SANtricity

NetApp SANtricity Storage Management Software is the foundation for the functions

and features included within the NetApp E Series:

Future Proof IT Investments – Modular flexibility through multiple form factors

and drive technology options. Flexible host and network interface options

Maintain Service Levels – SANtricity Remote Mirroring for proven data replication

and disaster recovery

Full-disk encryption; secure data at rest using FIPS 140-2 level-1–compliant

encryption

Reduced Infrastructure Costs – Maximum storage density.

Reduced Manual Operational Effort. Simplify storage and data management,

protection, and utilization

NetApp SANtricity DDP

Dynamic Disk Pools (DDP) balance storage resource usage by randomly spreading data

across all drives, balancing workload, and rebuilding if necessary. For example, taking a

pool of 10 RAID6 disks: they write 128k to 10 disks and then go to the next 10 when full.

Future Proof IT Investment – DDP effectiveness is not negatively affected by size of

data storage pool. It has been shown that it operates more effectively at larger data

pool levels. DDP can also accommodate current and emerging storage medium

technology.

Maintain Service Levels – DDP raises performance by three to four times over

HDD. Actual performance will vary based on your workload. For example,

streaming environments perform well in a spinning disk environment; flash a little

better. Performance is usually three times better when supporting database. Data

Analytics, 50 percent better. However, NetApp claims a typical performance

improvement of 10 times.


Transparently Responds to Anticipated Drive Failure

DDP is architected to anticipate a certain expected level of drive failure.

Decreases Mean Time to Recovery

Minimizes the impact of failure and has been shown to completely restore storage

system eight times faster than traditional RAID methodologies.

Protects data from media failure by distributing it, redundantly over a wide number

of physical media.

Auto Support (ASUP)

Storage System data is automatically sent to NetApp Technical Support when there is an

outage of any kind. NetApp remotely diagnoses the issues and the problems are

analyzed. They then work with the customer to resolve and correct the issues. There are

three types of messages sent:

1. Event Based – due to an actual outage

2. Daily Health Check – system event logs and performance data

3. Weekly Health Check – system configuration and system state information

Reduced Infrastructure Costs – Elimination of manual effort directly reduces OPEX.

Veritas InfoScale Enterprise

Veritas InfoScale Enterprise addresses enterprise IT service continuity needs. It provides

resiliency and software defined storage for critical services across customers’ datacenter

infrastructure.

Veritas Volume Replicator

Veritas Volume Replicator (VVR) is data-replication software to support business

continuity and disaster recovery initiatives. VVR maintains consistent copies of

application data at one or more remote locations.

Maintains Service Levels – Asynchronous data replication solution that can

replicate entire server volumes, file systems or single files across a WAN via IP.


Flexible Storage Sharing

This function enhances performance significantly vs. nonredundant Tier 1 storage

alternatives and, at the same time, lowers overall cost. For example, fully redundant

OLTP 4x performance, 20 percent cost of Tier1 SAN; fully redundant DW reduces query

times by 50 percent, completes 5x queries per hour at 11 percent cost of Tier1 SAN.

Ability to React Quickly to Changing Market Conditions – by allowing access to

both SAN and DAS, it expands infrastructure design/implementation options.

Maintain Service Levels – by enabling full replications and high availability it

strengthens the processing platform and lowers the risk of outages.

Reduced Infrastructure Costs – by increasing the performance of the existing

storage resource, it decreases the need to continually acquire new hardware.

Dynamic Multi-Pathing (DMP)

DMP enhances throughput performance by automatically rerouting data paths based on

traffic and load balancing algorithms.

Future Proof IT Investment – virtualized methodology separates the physical

storage medium from the system, thereby making it less hardware-dependent,

increasing its ability to accommodate emerging storage medium technology.

Maintain Service Levels – by continually monitoring and adjusting data paths, DMP

maintains services levels.

Reduced Infrastructure Costs – due to reduced manual operational efforts via

automation capabilities and its integration with the centralized storage management

within InfoScale Operations Manager, the impact on operations workloads are

minimized.

Smart Tier

Smart Tier, with its Intelligent Storage Tiering, is Veritas’s implementation of storage

tiering, in which the less frequently accessed data is placed on less expensive, slower

moving disk medium.

Maintain Service Levels – by directing more frequently accessed data to faster

storage medium, increases and maintains high performance levels.

Reduced Infrastructure Costs – maximizing the use of the varying speed and

performance of the storage disk pool extends the life of the storage resource.


Oracle Disk Manager (ODM)

Being able to interface with enterprise grade databases in a transparent and efficient

manner is one the key features of the Veritas InfoScale Enterprise suite. For example,

Veritas Extension for Oracle Disk Manager enhances file management and disk I/O

throughout and performance for Oracle databases.

Maintain Service Levels – this is accomplished by enabling more efficient use of

system-level capabilities like asynchronous I/O reads and writes, elimination of

superfluous data copying during processing, simultaneous I/O request processing,

and data caching to improve database throughput and performance. This enables

high performance throughput.

Deduplication/Compression/Thin Provisioning

Enterprise-grade storage systems use these three methods to extend the physical

medium, increasing the effective storage available to the system. Deduplication and

compression eliminate redundant data and empty data spaces that occur due to data

segment movement. Thin Provisioning is a hardware feature that enables storage

capacity to be over allocated to applications and physical capacity to be consumed only

as applications write data. In addition, it reclaims the space when the application no

longer needs the disk space.

Reduced Infrastructure Costs – the use of these three methods lowers the amount of

physical storage resource needed, thus decreasing capital expenditures.

Cluster File System (CFS)

Enables multiple servers to share the same storage resources. Other aspects of CFS are

embedded in the following comments.

Ability to React Quickly to Changing Market Conditions – CFS allows data to be

moved non-disruptively to support changing business and/or operational

requirements.

Future Proof IT Investment – CFS allows the user to mix and match heterogeneous

storage resources.

Maintain Service Levels – enables parallel processing and scales performance

linearly up to 64 servers.


InfoScale Availability

Designed to provide high availability and disaster recovery for databases and

applications, both custom and multi-tier, across physical and virtual environments.

Maintain Service Levels – Through Virtual Business Services (VBS), it recovers the

failed applications, and automatically manages the connection to other computing

resources. Intelligent Monitoring Framework proactively polls the infrastructure to

seek out and report on failed resources.

Veritas InfoScale Operations Manager (VIOM)

Provides centralized, single pane of glass view and management. It also provides

detailed system environment reports on servers, storage, availability, and licenses.

Maintain Service Levels – via single-pane-of-glass and comprehensive operations

reporting system.

Cisco Unified Computing System

The Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) is a next-generation solution for

blade and rack server computing. The system integrates a low-latency, lossless 10

Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) unified network fabric with enterprise-class, x86 architecture

servers. The system is an integrated, scalable, multi-chassis platform in which all

resources participate in a unified management domain.

Maintain Service Levels – Cisco UCS accelerates the delivery of new services

simply, reliably, and securely through end-to-end provisioning and migration

support for both virtualized and non-virtualized systems.


Cisco Nexus 5000

Cisco Nexus 5000 series switches are designed to deliver high-density, top-of-rack layer

2 and layer 3 10GbE with unified ports in compact 1RU and 2RU form factors. The Cisco

Nexus 5000 series includes Cisco Nexus 5500 and 5600 platforms as part of the Cisco

Unified Fabric portfolio.

The Cisco Nexus 5500 switches simplify convergence through broad connectivity

support. This makes them ideal top-of-rack access switches for traditional and

converged deployments.

Key Cisco Nexus 5500 series features include

1) Up to 1,152 ports in a single management domain that uses Cisco Fabric Extender

(FEX) architecture

2) Up to 96 unified ports

Future Proof IT Investment –The Cisco 5500 switches are designed to meet the

scalability demands of today’s data centers.


Conclusions

The data processing marketplace is significantly changed from just a few years ago,

which is expected to continue over the next 20 years, pressuring technology

manufacturers to properly address the business concerns in the marketplace quickly.

Technology manufacturers are responding to rapidly changing competitive business

pressures by planning for the long term.

This has been accomplished by both NetApp and Veritas; their solutions anticipate

technological changes in the future while being architected to provide the best

performance, now and tomorrow.

The specific features and functions of NetApp FlexPod Select and of Veritas InfoScale

Enterprise converged solution support enhance and supplement each other for a highly

valued, future-proofed storage solution. Organizations that are looking for converged

and/or cloud-based solutions should seriously consider this integrated platform.

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