Feature rich storage systems grab most of the headlines but when many organizations are pressed as to what features they really want a storage system to possess, their answer is simple. They want a Worry-free storage system that is reliable and easy to manage. In this third and final blog entry in my interview with NetApp VP Dave Mooney, he reveals what features contribute to making a storage system “Worry-free” and why having a reliable storage system “that just works” is so valuable to organizations today.
Jerome: What are you seeing as a competitive advantage on E-Series Storage Systems versus storage systems from companies like EMC or HDS?
Dave: When we talk to organizations, our competition will throw out a lot of functionality and capability in the product set in order to try to up sell into a higher price point.
We sell a product that has got a lot of value that organizations want. It is not necessarily a midrange product that has a lot of premium features that are never used. Our product is designed for a simple, Worry-free storage environment.
This is what we see when we compete against EMC. The customer may say, “Gosh, I really would like to have these types of higher end software features that EMC offers!” But then we ask, “Do you really want that? Is that what you really need?” The answer is, “Well, maybe someday.“
Then if they start to look at the price points of what it takes to configure these competitive systems, customers end up pricing themselves well beyond what they were prepared to spend.
So what we really emphasize is that when you buy an E-Series storage system, you know what you are getting. You are getting a very reliable product that is very expandable.
When you add storage to it, the cost of ownership years down the road is very low compared to some other products. Granted, competitors may have attractive entry level price points with a bare minimum of features but when you start to configure their systems and add on the features that you need to actually utilize them, they get more expensive. So we emphasize the value and the functions that you get Day 1 with the E-Series storage system that companies actually use on a day to day basis in their environment.
Jerome: What prompted you to start using the term “Worry-free”?
Dave: We have this algorithm called DDP (Dynamic Disk Pools) which basically takes RAID to a different level. Instead of writing in a RAID 5 or RAID 6 pattern, it distributes data randomly in a RAID 6 environment across a lot more drives.
That is the value of this architecture — rebuild times are no longer an issue. If you have a RAID 6 environment and it contains large capacity drives (3 or 4 TB,) it can take days to rebuild one of these drives. Then if you factor in a decent sized storage system, say 20 or 30 drives in a system, you end up rebuilding for days. Then not only is your performance negatively impacted but if another disk drive fails you could be in trouble.
The E-Series system writes data differently. When a drive fails, the E-Series system quickly moves data by gathering it from other drives with an almost non-existent performance impact. So in these systems, the concept of traditional rebuild is essentially gone.
Then if another drive fails, the E-Series storage system intelligently knows where all of the information is. So even if two or three drives fail in very rapid order (which is almost impossible but it could happen,) the data is protected.
Contrast this approach with many of today’s storage systems where if a drive fails in them you want to have it fixed right away. In this new environment, you do not necessarily have to fix it the same day or right away. You could fix it tomorrow or the day after because it is not as critical to the availability and reliability of the data.
It is as we looked at that and other aspects of our technology that we realized the E-Series systems allow organizations to worry less about drives and drive failures and instead focus on simply running their business.
The E-Series system becomes what we now refer to as “Worry-free.” There is both an installation aspect and a maintenance aspect to that concept. Further, the system is much easier to use so that if you want to add a drive, you plug it in and it automatically gets added to the E-Series storage system’s Dynamic Disk Pools (DDP).
The system then prompts you if you want to use the extra capacity. You click “Yes,” and then it automatically puts the extra storage capacity into the data pool. You may even add a tray of drives (up to 24 drives) by just plugging them into the system and it will generate the same prompt and ask if you would like to add the extra capacity.
So it is not only Worry-free from a maintenance point of view. It is also Worry-free from a storage capacity expansion viewpoint. You do not have to worry about re-provisioning LUNs or running out of storage capacity which makes it a lot more seamless to manage than other competitive storage systems.
Jerome: You have architected a system where hardware features are no longer a concern in terms of availability. You have taken all of those concerns off the table with the features you have added which in essence makes it “Worry-free.”
Dave: That is exactly right. One of the things we are trying to communicate with the “Worry-free” message is help people who are buying storage to understand that the storage should work and be reliable.
When we discuss “Worry-free” to CIOs, they just look at us and say, “We do not want to think about glitches in storage systems.” This contradicts what almost every other storage vendor in the market is saying when they talk about storage and the features their systems possess.
If you buy an E-Series storage system, you just plug it in and never have to think about it. It is one of the things that the E-Series storage system does better than any other product. It just works.
In Part I of this interview series, we examined how the clock is ticking on decades-old storage technologies.
In Part II of this interview series with Dave Mooney, he discusses what new features are now available on the DS Series so that managing it is a worry-free experience.