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WHITE PAPER

A Crucial Need for a Hardware-Optimized Platform


for Business-Critical Applications
Sponsored by: NetApp
Liz Conner
May 2014

Ashish Nadkarni

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Amid all the talk of a software-defined storage infrastructure, it is easy to forget the crucial role played
by hardware-optimized storage platforms in supporting business-critical workloads. This is not to say
that software-defined storage infrastructure has no place in the modern datacenter in fact, it is quite
the opposite. However, IDC believes that by combining software-defined elements with purpose-built
hardware, platforms like the NetApp FAS8080 EX offer an unparalleled value proposition when it
comes to solving some of the key challenges faced by businesses today:

Data challenges: Businesses are grappling with massive data growth. They are generating
more data, and the data is generated from many more sources that did not exist a few years
ago. Furthermore, they need to quickly analyze this data and convert it into information that
can then be processed by the business units.

Technology challenges: IT organizations are being pushed to doing more with less. They can
aim to do so by incorporating newer technologies such as software-defined storage and flash
and newer consumption models such as cloud. At the same time, they have to maintain service
quality and data security and, more importantly, meet all the service-level objectives (SLOs).

Business-critical applications: Businesses rely heavily on many applications to run their core
operations. These applications have little tolerance for unpredictable performance or
downtime, and any service interruptions are expensive damages range from revenue losses,
missed market opportunities, and competitive losses to lower customer satisfaction.

Platforms like the FAS8080 EX are designed specifically to run complex and data-intensive businesscritical and mission-critical workloads. They incorporate technologies that allow IT organizations to
effectively manage the scale, complexity, and cost of their mission-critical infrastructure while providing
an effective and agile delivery vehicle for businesses to stay competitive. Hardware-optimized
platforms are here to stay.

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IN THIS WHITE PAPER


In this white paper, IDC examines the need for hardware-optimized platforms like the NetApp
FAS8080 EX against the backdrop of challenges faced by modern businesses as they seek to
transform into data-driven entities, adopt newer technologies, and continue to invest in businesscritical applications to stay ahead of their competition.

MARKET BACKGROUND
Businesses today are morphing into information-driven entities at an unprecedented pace. This leads
them to create, organize, and store more and more data every day. To handle the conversion of "data to
information" effectively and in a timely fashion, they need an agile and scalable datacenter infrastructure.
Among the core components of this infrastructure are hardware-optimized platforms, which provide the
backbone needed to run multiple business-critical workloads simultaneously. To appreciate the role
played by such platforms, let us examine what challenges many enterprises face today.

Business Challenges
Businesses everywhere are coming under tremendous pressure to adapt to the changing world at an
unprecedented pace whether to remain competitive or stay relevant. They no longer have the luxury
of taking their time to understand problems and solve them or adapt to them. They have to conduct
business at the speed of light. This jettisons them into dealing with a whole new set of challenges,
which are discussed in the sections that follow.

Data Challenges
Most businesses are taking an information-centric approach to dealing with the new world era (which IDC
refers to as the 3rd Platform era). Businesses these days are collecting more data, collecting data from
multiple sources (including sources that were unheard of a few years ago), and holding on to this data
longer. This means that businesses in the midst of this transformation have to grapple with massive data
growth in their infrastructure. The newer data sources that businesses are dealing with include:

Sensor and machine-generated data: We are entering the "Internet of Things" era in which
practically every device, every appliance, and every machine will be connected to the Internet
and be sending operational data back to suppliers' operations centers. Sensors, embedded
in machines distributed across the globe sending data, make it possible for suppliers to
continuously monitor devices and take proactive actions to remedy an imminent operational
degradation.

Social media and collaboration data: In a user-connected world, in which social media forms
the fabric of communication and collaboration, data is of paramount importance. Businesses
gather this data to understand causality and correlation patterns so they can better service
both internal and external customers effectively.

Regulatory and compliance needs: Businesses are holding on to data for longer periods of
time to maintain compliance or meet regulatory requirements. Such data sources may include
patient records, data generated from systems of records, or user-generated data like emails.

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The data explosion problem is further exacerbated by the need to analyze data at an unprecedented
pace so that it can be converted into meaningful information in a time-sensitive fashion. In this Big Data
world, this information is then passed on to the various sponsoring business units which in turn create
more data-generation schemes. Businesses need faster ways to analyze stored data so they can:

Shorten product development times: Astute product development practices dictate the use of
data-driven approaches to shorten the time it takes to develop a product. Lengthy product
development times are not only costly but also risky.

Quickly market new products and services: Information can aid in measuring the pulse of the
market. Armed with the right information such as target demographics, market sentiment, and
targeted messaging, businesses can quickly market new products and services.

Make business decisions more quickly: Armed with the correct information and a feedback
cycle that can incorporate changes quickly, businesses can make faster business decisions.
Such decisions can make a big difference in businesses' ability to remain competitive and
operationally efficient or ensure that their products and services are relevant in the market.

Technology Challenges
IT organizations are being pushed to do more with less. They can aim to do so by incorporating newer
(and, many times, disruptive) technologies such as:

Flash technologies: Flash has become a cornerstone of performance and capacity


optimization in every storage infrastructure. Flash provides the on-demand balance between
dollar per IOPS when performance is necessary and dollar per gigabyte when capacity is
needed. Accordingly, the storage platform must allow businesses to strike this balance by
making appropriate use of flash.

Cloud: Newer opex-heavy consumption models such as cloud help businesses become agile,
cost efficient, and highly scalable. Whether it is by deploying private clouds or seamlessly
extending on-premise storage and compute into the public cloud, the use of cloud has
ramifications on how storage resources are consumed.

Software-defined storage: The adoption of software-defined technologies makes it easier for


businesses to deploy storage resources across the infrastructure and, more importantly, not
to be beholden to supplier-prescribed hardware instances. This has implications on many
expensive infrastructure tiers that can be shunted off to lower-cost tiers, gaining the muchneeded flexibility, federation, and agility in the environment.

As disruptive or unprecedented as these technologies may be, IT organizations have to maintain


service quality and data security and, more importantly, meet all the service-level objectives. This
means the infrastructure must:

Be designed with technology that is reliable and has been proven to perform well under the
most rigorous conditions.

Meet stated performance levels while also providing all other service-level objectives for
applications according to their data classification tier.

Scale on demand to handle growth from a few terabytes of data all the way to petabytes of
data, without the need for any forklift upgrades and/or disruptive migrations.

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Meet or exceed all security, governance, and regulatory requirements at the data level and the
user level.

Reduce the stress on IT by eliminating the need for forklift upgrades, allow for easy
management of petabytes of data, and provide high availability.

Business-Critical Applications
Businesses rely heavily on many applications to run their core operations. These applications have
little tolerance for unpredictable performance or downtime, and any service interruptions are expensive
damages range from revenue losses, missed market opportunities, and competitive losses to lower
customer satisfaction.
Examples of business-critical applications are various database applications (SAP, SQL Server,
Oracle, etc.); engineering, design, and automation applications; trading applications used by the
financial services industry; logistical inventory applications; and video streaming applications.
Four foundational pillars are essential to the functioning of business critical-applications: performance,
capacity and scalability, availability, and management. Any storage platform designed for businesscritical workloads must be able to balance and optimize its resources across all these pillars effectively.

THE NETAPP FAS8080 EX BUILT FOR BUSINESS-CRITICAL APPLICATIONS


NetApp has designed the FAS8080 EX specifically for "big iron" business-critical applications. The
FAS8080 EX is a hardware-optimized platform that offers best-in-class performance and capacity and that
can handle multiple grueling mission-critical workloads while scaling linearly to accommodate data growth.

Performance
Simply put, performance is the ability of the storage infrastructure to function as expected under most
expected and/or normal operational conditions. While performance of the infrastructure is dependent on
many variables, it must scale and/or readapt appropriately when one of these variables is altered within an
operational tolerance. The wider this tolerance range, the more resilient the array in terms of performance.
Two commonly used performance metrics are throughput and input/output operations per second, or IOPS.
While the latter is often stated as a theoretical maximum, it is often talked about in terms of response time
or latency. Examples of performance-critical applications are those used for EDA and chip design.
The FAS8080 EX platform features a more powerful x86-based controller that is designed from the
ground up for clustered ONTAP. Depending on the workload, the FAS8080 EX controllers can run
without flash acceleration in an all "spinning drive" configuration or with one of two versions of flash
a flash-accelerated hybrid configuration or an all-flash configuration. The FAS8080 EX offers 50%
more hybrid flash capacity than the previous highest model, the FAS6290, and can support almost half
a petabyte of hybrid flash in a 24-node cluster. In addition, the FAS8080 EX has a 70% performance
boost over the 6290, resulting in faster response times. Overall TCO has also seen a marked
improvement because of an increase in price/performance of almost two times as a result of increased
performance specs, with pricing the same as that of the previous generation.

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Capacity and Scalability


Storage platforms have to be designed to linearly and quickly scale to accommodate massive data
growth. Platforms need to scale without downtime or performance degradation and, more importantly,
without tilting the performance-to-capacity ratio. Capacity means not only capacity at rest but also
capacity in transit. The addition of capacity at rest also means that capacity in transit will increase in
other words, the sustained or burst in I/O and bandwidth caused by ingress and access of massive
amounts of data. Examples of capacity-critical applications are those used in natural resource
exploration and weather forecasting.
In the 24-node cluster, the FAS8080 EX can scale to nearly 70PB and provide 600 channels of
high-bandwidth I/O. To allow for flexibility, scalability, and future proofing, the FAS8080 EX includes
10GbE and UTA2 (10GbE/FCoE, 16Gbps FC) as well as support for switched optical SAS. The
FlexArray storage virtualization software is now available in all FAS8000 systems, including the
FAS8080 EX, and can be purchased and activated at any time. For example, the FlexArray software
allows a customer to virtualize storage arrays from EMC or Hitachi Data Systems behind a FAS8000
array. The benefit of this technology is that businesses can extend the shelf life of infrastructure
investments and make Data ONTAP the data access fabric. This new delivery model also allows
greater flexibility to utilize the virtualization technology as needed, in addition to a guaranteed 35%
reduction in storage needs and full ROI in nine months.

Availability
Unplanned interruptions or slowdowns in data availability and/or access can be very expensive for
most businesses. Businesses can pay dearly for every second that data is not available for example,
lost revenue, lost opportunity, and even lower customer satisfaction. For some businesses, the
difference between 3-9s and 5-9s can be devastating. Therefore, they need storage platforms that are
optimized for data availability so that their core business-critical applications continue to operate
without any unplanned interruptions.
In many cases, though, only marginal gains are made from additional availability or extra 9s; 5-9s to
6-9s to 7-9s. The cost of adding an extra 9 can outweigh the benefits. Specialized hardware is often
needed to achieve 6 or 7 9s, effectively eliminating any type of flexible, scale-out hardware.
Additionally, this specialized hardware for high availability typically runs a specialized OS that needs to
be managed separately from the rest of the IT infrastructure, adding to the complexity and IT cost of
additional availability. For many businesses dealing with large, time-sensitive data sets, 5-9s
availability is the balance between availability and cost. Businesses can quickly realize their business
objectives with the FAS8080 EX. It is proven to offer more than 5-9s availability, which is achieved via
a combination of hardware optimization (in the controller) and software optimization (in Data ONTAP).
Businesses can put the FAS8080 EX platform through stringent service-level objectives by leveraging
functions such as quality of service and nondisruptive operations.

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Management
Storage platforms have to meet stringent SLOs for business-critical applications in private cloud and
noncloud environments most of which are densely virtualized. Customers can manage a FAS8000
cluster of machines using NetApp OnCommand Management software. If they choose to build a
private cloud, then Data ONTAP provides the necessary capabilities, such as nondisruptive
operations, quality of service, and secure multitenancy all of which provide consistent storage
access to business-critical and non-business-critical workloads in cloud and noncloud environments.
The FAS8080 EX platform works well with management systems used to manage large storage
environments. Features such as secure multitenancy and data portability make the FAS8080 EX an
excellent choice as a storage backbone for a private cloud infrastructure. Simplified and improved
management of the FAS8080 EX also helps streamline IT operations; installs finish three times faster,
NDOs simplify long-term scaling, and more types of downtime (tech refreshes, hardware repair,
updates) are eliminated.

OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES


NetApp's introduction of the FAS8080 EX, along with the steps taken to reach this point, has presented
the company with a number of opportunities, specifically a more concise, well-defined product portfolio
offering and a gateway into the recently emerged scenario of massive time-sensitive data sets.
With the introduction of the FAS8080 EX, and more generally the new FAS8000 line, NetApp has
simplified and consolidated its product portfolio. The FAS3200 and FAS6200 are being replaced by the
FAS8020, FAS8040, and FAS8060, with the FAS8080 EX being introduced as the new top-of-the-line
flagship product. In addition, the FlexArray virtualization software is being rolled into the entire
FAS8000 family, eliminating the need for a separate V-Series product line.
The product consolidation and simplification eliminate product overlap, reduce product
development/testing cycles, and allow for quicker time to market for NetApp gains that can be seen
by the end user. The portfolio consolidation will mean less product confusion, an easier buying
decision, and a quicker purchasing/deployment cycle for the end user. The opportunity for internal
streamlining also exists as marketing/sales employees, channel partners, help desk staff, and others
have to be up to date on only one product family instead of three different product families, allowing for
greater efficiency.
The introduction of the FAS8080 EX as NetApp's new "big iron" flagship product brings with it the
ability to allow for massive data scale while still delivering high-end performance through I/O flexibility
and flash acceleration. The FAS8080 EX allows NetApp a gateway into industries with the growing
need to quickly analyze huge data sets. Industries such as weather forecasting, natural resource
exploration, engineering, financial services, and video streaming are all experiencing massive data
growth while trying to meet performance requirements to keep their business-critical applications
running. The FAS8080 EX is well placed to meet these demands and provides NetApp the opportunity
to displace other more costly specialized hardware with its own more modular offering.

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CONCLUSION AND ESSENTIAL GUIDANCE


The business market is rapidly evolving from a commodity-centric market to a more information-driven
market. Businesses are facing increased pressure to store, manage, and analyze massive data sets,
resulting in pain points around performance, capacity and scalability, availability, and management.
NetApp has addressed these four dimensions with the rollout of the FAS8000 line and, specifically, the
introduction of the new FAS8080 EX. Improved hardware internals and a building blocklike model
allow for top-of-the-line performance while increasing flexibility. Increased NDO capabilities, updated
management software, greater than 5-9s availability, and better integration with applications while
leveraging a hybrid cloud model allow for increased availability and simplified management. To
succeed with the FAS8080 EX, NetApp must take the following steps:

Highlight the reduced TCO and increased performance of the FAS8080 EX. To differentiate
the FAS8080 EX from existing NetApp offerings and similar offerings from competitors,
NetApp must show that the FAS8080 EX can meet the performance requirements of Big Data
and other business-critical needs while avoiding costly specialized hardware.

Educate customers about and promote the consolidation of the NetApp product portfolio,
along with the introduction of FAS8080 EX, the new flagship product. The streamlined portfolio
will increase end-user understanding, lower purchasing cycles, and increase efficiency for
NetApp development, allowing for faster enhancements to reach the end user.

Continue to explore use cases and opportunities for the FAS8080 EX. Data storage and, more
importantly, usage of the stored data have fundamentally changed as data is no longer
considered a stagnant entity. Data is now a virtual commodity on which various analytics can
result in great value. It is very likely that new use cases and industries will emerge over the
next few years, all needing storage that can optimize performance, capacity and scalability,
availability, and management.

Consolidation of the product portfolio along with providing a refresh and hardware improvements on
the remaining products will help NetApp become strategically more capable of competing in the
storage market. With the introduction of the FAS8080 EX, NetApp has rolled out a top-of-the-line
product that offers increased flexibility and performance and that addresses both data and
technological pain points. With the FAS8080 EX, NetApp has introduced a flagship product that
reduces end users' TCO, can meet the demands of business-critical applications, and can be highly
competitive in the market.

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About IDC
International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory
services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications and consumer technology
markets. IDC helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community make factbased decisions on technology purchases and business strategy. More than 1,100 IDC analysts
provide global, regional, and local expertise on technology and industry opportunities and trends in
over 110 countries worldwide. For 50 years, IDC has provided strategic insights to help our clients
achieve their key business objectives. IDC is a subsidiary of IDG, the world's leading technology
media, research, and events company.

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