Over the past few weeks I have witnessed the proverbial mudslinging that takes place in the blogosphere when marketing feathers are ruffled. Most recently I was reading Rich Anderson of The StorageSavvy Blog. The article was "Compression better than Dedup? NetApp Confirms!"
I have to agree with Rich on many fronts. First, "When all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail." Rich points out vendors have to sell "what's in the bag" so it is conceivable that all problems look like they can be solved with their solution. If you look back over the last few years NTAP has always had a "me too" reputation. Whatever the industry has, they have one too and its better. For the last few years, while competing against Storwize, they have pulled the EMC tactic of trying to stall a market by saying, "We have optimization for primary storage with deduplication." The reality is, you can't use it in real time, it is a resource hog, and again Rich mentions, the only use case it works well on in primary storage is VMware (and that is ONLY IF the customer stores their data outside the .vmdk file otherwise compression is much better). Now that NTAP has compression their story has changed saying that compression on primary storage is better for most use cases. Duh! The folks at Storwize (now IBM Real-time Compression) have been saying that for years. Why, deduplication is great for repetitive data sets, i.e. backup, not primary storage. There just isn't that much repetitive data in primary storage. Again, NTAP is trying to stall the market saying they have "in-line" compression for primary storage. Sorry guys, not good enough. In-line is NOT Real-time. Rich also points out that the key characteristics of storage for customers are capacity and performance. Patrick Rogers of NTAP has said publically that compression WILL indeed impact performance and that they even have a tool that will tell you how much performance will be impacted. While NTAP may say compression is "free", we all know nothing worth having in life is free, you get what you pay for. If you need the performance to do compression you are going to have to perform a major upgrade to your filer in order to just be able to perform compression let alone try to do compression in real time. No real savings there.
It’s a simple fact that embedding optimization technology into the array you are optimizing is the right direction, it is just not ready for prime time today for a number of key reasons. If you can't implement the technology in the array and preserve performance, availability, price and feature set, then its not a viable solution. I know that every answer in IT is "It depends", and I am sure there are some use cases where the solution is "good enough" for some customers who meet all the proper criteria, the reality is, it is not ready for the general public.
On the other hand, if you can off load the work from the array in an appliance model, preserve performance and ensure 100% transparency to applications, infrastructure and processes then that is a real solution. This is exactly what the real-time compression technology does from IBM. Yes it is an appliance that sits in your CIFS/NFS storage infrastructure. However, the benefits of the time based compression technology, along with the ability, by offloading the array from doing the compression, to maintain and in some cases increase performance, and the fact that putting the technology in place requires no change to your applications, no changes to your storage infrastructure and no changes to your downstream processes means this solution is the top primary storage optimization solution on the market. It's not a big surprise. First the technology comes from an Israeli startup, some of the smartest minds in storage / high tech. Second, most great solutions start out as an appliance. They are easy to deploy and allow you to get an understanding of how the technology really works in multiple use cases before trying to embed the solution with limited information.
Below are the top 10 reasons to deploy a Real-time Compression appliance for NAS from IBM over NTAP compression technology:
Of the customers running the technology in their environment over 57% of these customers have rated the Real-time Compression technology an "Excellent value – one of the top values in my data center" or better.
I am guessing by David Vaughn's visceral reaction that Rich hit a nerve that is more than just the typical old NTAP / EMC battling. I don't think anyone ever told David that usually when you have such a reaction to something, you must be trying to hide something. In this case, while NTAP has great products, they fall short when it comes to optimization technology. Also, would you want your migration process to look like this?
