back to article NetApp offers ONTAP as a cloud for all seasons

NetApp has updated its ONTAP operating system release into what it calls a data fabric spanning private, hybrid, and public clouds, and includes a SW-only Cloud ONTAP edition running in public clouds. NetApp is also offering new services for hybrid clouds. There's an Enterprise Transformation Workshop for Cloud, an Efficiency …

  1. StorageEngineer

    Wow..that all sounds like gigantic ONTAP with all features.. does it perform in real??

    >> All-flash FAS will offer 350,000 IOPS at less than 1.3msecs latency, which is a

    >> 70 per cent improvement over cDOT 8.2 at that latency.

    Is NetApp officially saying this??? This is so not-like NetApp. May be you are talking about FlashRay product and not FAS-ONTAP??? There is no way that gigantic ONTAP all flash can do this...if it does, netapp might be the big gainer in all flash market ..hard to believe..

    where is this all information published?

    1. Paul Hargreaves

      > May be you are talking about FlashRay product and not FAS-ONTAP???

      From the article:

      "The efficiency and performance improvements are significant and many are the result of work in FlashRay's Mars OS which has transferred over to ONTAP."

      > here is no way that gigantic ONTAP all flash can do this...if it does

      Why not? ONTAP has never been a slouch e.g. (SFS benchmarks, SPC-1 benchmarks).

  2. Man Mountain

    It has been a slouch ... their recent SPC-1 result (80k ish from memory) was about the same as a now retired 3PAR F400 (4+ years old). NetApp have never been about performance. I'd love to see if you can turn any functionality on and get anywhere near that 350k number.

    1. JohnMartin

      ONTAP Performance

      -Disclosure NetApp employee expressing personal opinions-

      The 80Kish SPC-1 number was for a 2-node mid-range array using mostly spinning disk accelerated by a small amount of flash. More than enough for most people, especially in a hybrid configuration, but as you rightly point out hardly a spectacular number for an all Flash array. That test wasn't done to show a top line number of what ONTAP could do, but to give an indication of performance for a configuration that represented what most people are still buying today. It's worth noting that ONTAP has prettily linear performance scaling as you add nodes (as shown in the SPEC-SFS benchmarks), and that you can add 8 Nodes into a SAN configuration. I'll let you do the math from there :-)

      NetApp's current top line SPC-1 number for a hybrid, mostly disk configuration from back in 2012 is currently sitting around 250,000 SPC-1 IOPS. While I cant say if or when you might see an All Flash FAS SPC-1 result, the FAS8080EX is a significantly more powerful box than the 6240's, or indeed the 8040 mentioned above. When you add that to the optimisations that have been done in the code path for all Flash FAS in ONTAP 8.3, I think it will will change the way people think about ONTAP and performance.

      1. Man Mountain

        Re: ONTAP Performance

        The F400 result was for a 4 year old, entry (and now dead) array running only spinning disk and the NetApp result from earlier this year couldn't even beat that despite having some flash! A disappointing outcome, however you try and frame it. I am genuinely interested to see how that claimed performance stands up when you actually start trying to do something useful with the array. People are not going to buy a NetApp array based on pure grunt so if they numbers disappear over a cliff when you turn on various functions then they are irrelevant. Also interested why the 1.3ms response time rather than the assumed 1ms typically used for flash numbers.

      2. elip

        Re: ONTAP Performance

        does this mean the single-threaded write per head is gone?

        1. JohnMartin

          Re: ONTAP Performance

          I don't think writes have ever been single threaded in ONTAP, there is a global checkpoint per controller where the writes are flushed from memory to disks in an atomic operation, but the actual process for doing that has been multi-threaded in the RAID layer since pretty much the beginning (i.e. all disks that were chosen to be part of that commit were written in parallel.)

          The parallelism work for multi-core processors in ONTAP is remarkably cool, its kind of a pity NetApp doesn't publicise how it works.

  3. JohnMartin
    Happy

    It's NetApp Jim .. but not as we know it.

    -Disclosure NetApp Employee expressing personal opinions-

    I smiled to myself when I read the comment "Is NetApp officially saying this??? This is so not-like NetApp",

    The things which NetApp have been working on in across the portfolio including ONTAP, FAS, FlashRay, StorageGrid Webscale, Workflow Automator (WFA), and the rest of the ONCOMMAND software suite, have all been converging to this point for what seems like a really long time. Until now, at best we've only been able to give hints about what's we'd be releasing and what this means. Now that waiting is done, and I think you'll see NetApp do a bunch of things you'd never expect.

    As far as "All-flash FAS will offer 350,000 IOPS at less than 1.3msecs latency", while I wasn't at the press briefing, those figures sound about right. In ONTAP 8.2, All Flash FAS already outperforms most "purpose built" flash arrays at a lower price point, with 8.3 (which is a free and _Non Disruptive_ software upgrade for Clustered Data ONTAP) customers should see significant additional latency improvements, especially those running on the latest FAS8000 platforms.

    If you were surprised by this, just wait, there's a lot more coming :-)

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