Veeam to Deliver NetApp HCI Native Integration

October 23, 2018 By Adam Bergh Leave a Comment

Note: This blog originally appeared on the Veeam.com Blog.

Four years ago, Veeam delivered to the market ground-breaking native snapshot integration into NetApp’s flagship ONTAP storage operating system. In addition to operational simplicity, improved efficiencies, reduced risk and increased ROI, the Veeam Hyper-Availability Platform and ONTAP continues to help customers of all sizes accelerate their Digital Transformation initiatives and compete more effectively in the digital economy.

Today I’m pleased to announce a native storage integration with Element Software, the storage operating system that powers NetApp HCI and SolidFire, is coming to Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 with the upcoming Update 4.

Key milestones in the Veeam + NetApp Alliance

Veeam continues to deliver deeper integration across the NetApp Data Fabric portfolio to provide our joint customers with the ability to attain the highest levels of application performance, efficiency, agility and Hyper-Availability across hybrid cloud environments. Together with NetApp, we enable organizations to attain the best RPOs and RTOs for all applications and data through native snapshot based integrations.

How Veeam integration takes NetApp HCI to Hyper-Available

With Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 Update 3, we released a brand-new framework called the “Universal Storage API.” This set of API’s allows Veeam to accelerate the adoption of storage-based integrations to help decrease impact on the production environment, significantly improve RPOs and deliver significant operational benefits that would not be attainable without Veeam.

Let’s talk about how the new Veeam integration with NetApp HCI and SolidFire deliver these benefits.

Backup from Element Storage Snapshots

The Veeam Backup from Storage Snapshot technology is designed to dramatically reduce the performance impact typically associated with traditional API driven VMware backup on primary hypervisor infrastructure.

This process dramatically improves backup performance, with the added benefit of reducing performance impact on production VMware infrastructure.

Granular application item recovery from Element Storage Snapshots

If you’re a veteran of enterprise storage systems and VMware, you undoubtably know the pain of trying to recover individual Windows or Linux files, or application items from a Storage Snapshot. The good news is that Veeam makes this process fast, easy and painless. With our new integration into Element snapshots, you can quickly recover application items directly from the Storage Snapshot like:

Individual Windows or Linux guest files
Exchange items
MS SQL databases
Oracle databases
Microsoft Active Directory items
Microsoft SharePoint items

What’s great about this functionality is that it works with a Storage Snapshot created by Veeam and NetApp, and the only requirement is that VMs need to be in the VMDK format.

Hyper-Available VMs with Instant VM Recovery from Element Snapshots

Everyone knows that time is money and that every second that a critical workload is offline your business is losing money, prestige and possibly even customers. What if I told you that you could recover an entire virtual machine, no matter the size in a very short timeframe? Sound farfetched? Instant VM Recovery technology from Veeam which leverages Element Snapshots for NetApp HCI and SolidFire makes this a reality.

Not only is this process extremely fast, there is no performance loss during this process, because once recovered, the VM is running from your primary production storage system!

Veeam Instant VM Recovery on NetApp HCI

Element Snapshot orchestration for better RPO

It’s common to see a nightly or twice daily backup schedule in most organizations. The problem with this strategy is that it leaves your organization with a large data loss potential of 12-24 hours. We call the amount of acceptable data loss your “RPO” or recovery point objective. Getting your RPO as low as possible just makes good business sense. With Veeam and Element Snapshot management, we can supplement the off-array backup schedule with more frequent storage array-based snapshots. One common example would be taking hourly storage-based snapshots in between nightly off-array Veeam backups. When a restore event happens, you now have hourly snapshots, or a Veeam backup to choose from when executing the recovery operation.

Put your Storage Snapshots to work with Veeam DataLabs

Wouldn’t it be great if there were more ways to leverage your investments in Storage Snapshots for additional business value? Enter Veeam DataLabs — the easy way to create copies of your production VMs in a virtual lab protected from the production network by a Veeam network proxy.

The big idea behind this technology is to provide your business with near real-time copies of your production VMs for operations like dev/test, data analytics, proactive DR testing for compliance, troubleshooting, sandbox testing, employee training, penetration testing and much more! Veeam makes the process of test lab rollouts and refreshes easy and automated.

NetApp + Veeam = Better Together

NetApp Storage Technology and Veeam Availability Suite are perfectly matched to create a Hyper-Available data center. Element storage integrations provide fast, efficient backup capabilities, while significantly lowering RPOs and RTOs for your organization.

Find out more on how you can simplify IT, reduce risk, enhance operational efficiencies and increase ROI through NetApp HCI and Veeam.

And Now For Something Not So Completely Different…

February 27, 2018 By Adam Bergh Leave a Comment

Today I am happy to announce that I’ve taken a position with Veeam to be their new Global Alliance Architect for NetApp. In this new role I will be focusing on continuing Veeam and NetApp’s already deep technology integrations and expanding them into new product categories and new cloud integrations and capabilities. I’ll be serving as the subject matter expert in NetApp technologies and be the primary interface to the technical resources from both Veeam and NetApp.

For the better part of the last ten years I have been working exclusively in “the channel” as we often refer to it. We often call ourselves consultants or value-added resellers and systems engineers. We partner with the major vendors, OEMs, and manufactures, to engineer best of breed and often cutting-edge data center solutions to meet very specific customer requirements. Throughout the years working with dozens of the industry’s most widely known and respected companies, we inevitably end up focusing in on certain technologies and vendors that just seem to be cut above the rest. Whether they be from a technological or usability advantage, or from an ease of doing business standpoint, a few companies always just stand out.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know there’s been no secret about my love for enterprise storage solution vendor NetApp. NetApp’s portfolio of enterprise storage and cloud solutions, in my opinion is the best in the industry, and from a pure technology standpoint, is the most robust and complete solution set available from one company.

Being the data center junkie that I am, I know the key strategic value of data protection, application recoverability, and business continuity. There has always been one company that leads in the space and integrates into NetApp’s portfolio better than anyone else in the industry: That company is Veeam Software. Having sold and implemented Veeam’s software packages for many of my strategic clients, through personal experience I can absolutely vouch that Veeam truly is “Availability for the Always On Enterprise” and it truly does “Just Work”.

I can’t stress how excited I am to be “marrying” my love of two great tech companies and getting to be able to have a hand in bringing incredible new joint solutions into this market space.

A a huge THANK YOU need to go out to my previous home, Presidio Networked Solutions. Without question the top digital next generation solution provider in the VAR space. I had the privilege of working with some of the most talented solution architects and technical sales people in the industry and encourage any of my readers to check them out if you’re looking for your next career move.

It’s onward to new challenges for me and I can’t wait to make a new home with the Veeam Dreeam Teeam!

Need for Speed? NetApp Launches the EF570

September 22, 2017 By Adam Bergh 1 Comment

Two questions for you…

1. Do you like speed? 2. Do you want to pay a lot for it?

If your answers are 1. Hell Yes! and 2. Hell No! – today is your day.

Here comes NetApp’s newest All-Flash dragster – The EF570

Before we get into the specs on this new kit, let’s review a little bit of a history.

NetApp’s E and EF Series storage systems run an OS called ‘SANtricity’. SANtricity has shipped with over a million systems for over 20 Years, and is the #1 ‘SAN only’ OS deployed in the world. In short, this is no new comer to the industry and is a rock-solid enterprise class hardware platform.

SANtricity differs from NetApp’s flagship OS ‘ONTAP’ in that it’s streamlined architecture optimized for:

low-latency workloads
big data analytics
bare metal applications
price/performance considerations
highest bandwidth in very dense form factor.

With that being said, let’s get into the newest in the line up:

The EF570

The EF570 is the successor to the immensely popular EF560.

This newest system is rated for 1 Million 4k IOPS at .3ms of latency. That’s 300 MICRO seconds of latency – at ONE MILLION IOPS.

Oh, and how does 21 GBps of read throughput and and a total max capacity of 1.8PB work for you?

These numbers are up from about 850,000 IOPs at 800 micro seconds of latency and 12GBps of read throughput on the previous gen EF560. Not a bad bump.

I know what you’re thinking though, these are just marketing numbers, how about you show me an independent benchmark.

Take a look at NetApp’s SPC benchmarks below:

SPC-1 Benchmark Results

SPC-2 Benchmark Results

Guess who now holds the #1 spot all time in Price/Performance ratio in both SPC-1 and SPC-2 benchmarks?

Spoiler alert: It’s the EF570!

SPC-1 Results:

These show an incredible 500k SPC-1 IOPs with an overall response time of .26ms!

SPC-2 Results:

The SPC-2 test is focused on throughput. Here you can see an incredible 21GBps throughput on a database query test!

More On Performance

The pace at which NetApp keeps ramping up the performance on the EF platform is pretty staggering. Check out this comparison graph on the history of the EF lineup on OLTP workloads:

What else is new?

An all new HTML5 management interface that’s now easier than ever with SANtricity 11.4.

New host interfaces: 100Gb NVMe over InfiniBand, 32Gb FC, 25Gb iSCSI, 12Gb SAS, 100Gb IB

Yes that’s right, NetApp now has NVMe front-end interfaces. More on this to come in a future blog post!

When Can I Get It?!?!

The new EF570 starts to ship this October and is available for order today.

Storage Field Day 12 – Day 2 Recap

March 21, 2017 By Adam Bergh 2 Comments

Day 2 of storage field day was absolutely massive. We brought out the big names today as we visited the mothership of of Nimble Storage, NetApp, and Datera!

Nimble Storage

We had the privilege of dropping by the Nimble Storage headquarters in Silicone Valley to be greeted by a giant banner welcoming us to #SFD12! That was nice of Nimble.

We arrived at Nimble at an interesting time. We had just learned about HP Enterprise’s intent to acquire Nimble Storage. The topic came up over breakfast of course, with much of the information being too new to share publicly. I can’t share much of what we heard, but let’s just say HP is really excited about having Nimble in the fold and has big plans for their tech.

Nimble Arrives In the Cloud

The HP news notwithstanding, Nimble had a big tech announcement to make: Nimble Cloud Volumes!

all flash arrays

At the 10,000 foot level the new Nimble cloud service is Nimble storage technology in a shared environment with a direct 1ms latency connection into AWS and Azure, with a brand new web based provisioning interface painted on top of it all.

Nimble believes standard hyperscaler storage is not redundant and resilient enough. In steps NCV to provided 6 9’s or data protection and rich data services you’ve come to know and love with Nimble. And they may be on to something as AWS just had a major outage.

Nimble Storage Cloud Volumes Overview with Gavin Cohen

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcS-CDaurZY)

Nimble Storage Cloud Volumes Demo with Sandeep Karmarkar

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnZ4w7ceegs)

InfoSight is Still King.

Rod Bagg, Vice President, Analytics & Customer Support at Nimble goes deep on the biggest driver of Nimble sales – InfoSight. If you’re not aware of Nimble’s InfoSight analytics platform you should be.

Nimble Storage InfoSight Predictive Analytics Overview with Rod Bagg

Nimble Storage InfoSight Demo with David Adamson

Nimble Storage Achieving Six-Nines Availability with Rod Bagg

Nimble Storage Docker Volume Plugin with Sakthi Chandra and Michael Mattsson

NetApp

As a member of the NetApp A-Team I always love to get to Sunnyvale to meet with the NetApp team to hear straight from the horse’s mouth what the big “N” has been cooking up. This visit didn’t disappoint as NetApp pulled out a few things that I didn’t even know they were working on.

After this visit one thing became abundantly clear, NetApp is “all-in: on their data fabric vision for the hybrid cloud.

Arthur Lent, VP, Chief Architect, reviews updates to NetApp’s Data Fabric. He puts the updates into the context of the problems of the modern enterprise, primarily the issue of data silos. Arthur reviews how over the last two years, the capabilities and versatility of Data Fabric has exploded.

What’s New with NetApp Data Fabric with Arthur Lent

Duncan Moore, Director, StorageGRID software, reviews the recent trend in object storage. He then uses this to pivot into a discussion of the ongoing gaps within object storage, particularly with unstructured data. He then reviews how StorageGRID can serve to extend NetApp’s Data Fabric through S3. Finally, Duncan reviews how StorageGRID scales to Webscale storage needs.

NetApp Object Storage and StorageGRID with Duncan Moore

And the highlight of the visit to NetApp, Dave Hitz, Executive VP and Founder of NetApp, further discusses the history of Data Fabric, and their overall cloud vision. He further reviews how the state of the company changed over the last two years, including the massive growth in their all-flash storage array.

Top of Mind Discussion with NetApp Founder Dave Hitz

Datera

Last but not least on day 2 we visited startup Datera, who’s promising High Performance elastic block storage, cloud-like agility on-prem to deliver operational simplicity.

First up we got meeting with Marc Fleischmann, CEO and Founder of Datera. He overviews their Elastic Data Storage, which is targeted toward on-premises clouds. Their overall mission is to bring data simplicity, agility and performance to on-prem clouds, and to allow for better data management across a hybrid cloud.

Datera Update with CEO and Founder, Marc Fleischmann

Ashok Rajagopalan, Head of Products, introduces their Elastic Data Fabric, which is designed to defragment the data center and improve utilization. This solution is flexible enough for any application, allows for mixed nodes within a on-premises cloud, provides for true scale-out, and allows for any orchestration stack.

Datera Elastic Data Fabric with Ashok Rajagopalan

Nic Bellinger, CTO and Co-Founder, goes to the whiteboard to review their distributed placement implementation within Datera’s solution. He reviews how Datera designed their solution around application requirements at a very high level. This makes the entire system built around constant change, allowing you to easily verify your placement map without disrupting IO.

How We Built Datera with Nic Bellinger, CTO and Co-Founder

Bill Borsari, Head of Systems Engineering, gives a preliminary demonstration of the Datera user interface. The system obscures the carefully constructed architecture behind an easy to consumer UI. He walks through the various views available to administrators, including active nodes, and overall system performance. Finally, he digs into how the system handle application performance on a policy level.

Datera Elastic Data Fabric Demo with Bill Borsari

Bill Borsari, Head of Systems Engineering, demonstrates using Datera with OpenStack. He shows created volumes in OpenStack being reflected in their GUI. This also allows for viewing tenancy, as well as volumes.

Datera Ecosystem Demo: OpenStack with Bill Borsari

Bill Borsari, Head of Systems Engineering, demonstrates Datera working with Kubernetes. With it, you can set a block storage volume for the container instances to use, which can be added to if additional workloads are created by Kubernetes.

Datera Ecosystem Demo: Kubernetes with Bill Borsari

NetApp Announces Next Gen Hardware – FAS2600, FAS8200, FAS9000 and More

September 26, 2016 By Adam Bergh Leave a Comment

Today NetApp has dropped some huge news on the storage industry on Day 1 of NetApp Insight 2016 – An entirely refreshed FAS and All-Flash FAS (AFF) Portfolio and ONTAP 9.1!

There is almost too much in here for one post, but I’ll get to the major highlights:

Introducing the FAS2600 – The next gen mid-range hybrid platform.

NetApp’s new FAS2600 is anything but entry level. The successor to the hugely popular FAS2500 series of hybrid-arrays the FAS2600 cranks the entry-level up to 11. Let’s start with what the platform is really all about – Speed. And lots of it. According to NetApp, this beast will be 3x the performance of the previous FAS2500 line. With these new specs I don’t doubt it:

12 CPU cores: 3x more physical cores compared to FAS2500
64GB memory: ~2x more memory compared to FAS2500
8GB NVMEM: 2x more NVMEM compared to FAS2500

Published performance stats have the FAS2600 pushing over 100,000 4k NFS IOPs and 4GBps. How’s that for entry level?

Published specs are as follows vs. the FAS2552 which it’s replacing:

Let’s take a look at the back of the new FAS2600:

Some of the enhancements here are: Mini-SAS running at 12GB. Two dedicated 10GB SFP+ ports for the cluster network, and four 16GB/10Gbe UTA2 ports.

Take a closer look:

Oh yeah, one more thing. Every FAS2600 comes with 1TB of NVMe on board as FlashCache! Now every system in the field will get all the flashy goodness with some NVMe. More to come on the FAS2600 when I get my hands on one.

Introducing the FAS8200 – The Evolution of Enterprise Hybrid FAS

Gone are the days of having four models of FAS8000 to choose from. NetApp is simplifying their product lineup with the single model FAS8200. A three rack unit high dual controller chassis that will scream with performance. Check out the new specs vs the FAS8040, which we expect the FAS8200 to slot into in terms of list price:

~50% performance improvement
32 CPU cores: 2 times more cores
256GB memory: 4 times more memory
Onboard NVMe M.2 flash (Love this)
4 mini-SAS3 ports for external storage
2 dedicated 10GbE cluster interconnect ports
4 UTA2 16Gb FC or 10GbE ports; also supports GbE
2 10GbE Base-T ports
PCIe Gen3 architecture

The published specs vs. a FAS8040

Let’s take a look at the back of the FAS8200

Some of the enhancements here are the four mini-SAS connections, 2 dedicated 10GBe ports for the cluster network and the 4 16GB FC/10Gbe UTA2 ports.

My thoughts:

This is going to be the most popular controller for the mid-range and most enterprise customers. They shaved 3U off the 8040/8060/8080 which is always nice. The performance on this box is going to be very competitive in the market.

Introducing the FAS9000 – AKA “The Beast!”

Ok, now for something totally unexpected from NetApp – An entirely new platform unlike anything we have ever seen! The FAS9000! Whoa, where do we begin on this thing. It’s an entirely new concept from NetApp. A completely modular chassis where every component can be swapped out individually. That means the the CPU controllers have been entirely decoupled from I/O modules and NVRAM.

Here are some of the highlights:

Single model: FAS9000
Modular RAS focused architecture
I/O slots separate from controllers
Individually pluggable and serviceable I/O modules
Hot-swap capable after ONTAP® enhancements
Based on latest Intel Broadwell 18-core processors
Uses NVMe-connected SSDs for onboard flash
Up to 50% performance increase over FAS8080 EX
Enhanced I/O capabilities, higher throughput adapters
40GbE, 32Gb FC
Full 12Gb SAS connectivity to external drives
In-band ACP support
~50% performance improvement
72 CPU cores: 80% more cores
1024GB memory: 4x increase
DDR4 memory
64GB NVRAM: 2x more NVRAM
High-speed HA interconnect, 80Gb bandwidth
Onboard NVMe-attached SSD flash
Enhanced I/O layout
I/O slots outside processor module
PCIe Gen3 slots, X16 wide lanes for each I/O slot
10 I/O slots per controller (plus 2 NVMe slots)

Take a look at the back of the FAS9000

Front View

Here are some specs of the FAS9000 compared to the previous top end FAS8080. A nice bump in all categories. This should satisfy the largest of enterprise workloads.

Let’s talk performance

Let’s compare the new gear’s performance vs the generation be replaced:

I think these numbers speak for themselves. NetApp is really pushing the bar upwards on what a hybrid-array is capable of. Nice Work NetApp.

More NetApp Innovation – 40GBe and 32GB FC

On the heals of becoming the first storage vendor to offer 15.3 TB SSDs in their All-Flash Arrays, NetApp is first to market with 40GB Ethernet and 32GB FC Support!

32GB FC Notes:

NetApp is launching 32Gb FC target adapter in ONTAP 9.1
Will be supported in currently shipping FAS/AFF80x0 controllers
Also supported in new FAS & AFF platforms (FAS8200, FAS9000, AFF A300, AFF A700)
Provides FC target connectivity for end-to-end 32Gb FC installs
FC Initiator support a possible candidate for a future ONTAP release
Shipped with two short wave length SFP+ optics included

40GBe Notes:

NetApp is launching 40GbE adapter in ONTAP 9.1
Supported in new FAS & AFF platforms
FAS8200, FAS9000, AFF A300, AFF A700
Provides end to end 40GbE support from host to storage backend
40Gb to 40GbE connection or fan out to 4 x 10GbE connections
QSFP+ Passive Copper and extended Short Reach(eSR) cables

Next Gen All Flash FAS –A300 and A700

Today NetApp has also announced new distinct naming conventions for the “AFF” All-Flash hardware lineup – The A300 and A700

The A300 is essentially the FAS8200 and the A700 is the FAS9000 with new bezels.

A300 Front View

A700 Front View

The hardware specs match the FAS8200 and FAS9000 systems.

Let’s take a look at the performance of this hardware in the all flash configurations:

NetApp is estimating that the A300 can produce 50% higher throughput that an AFF8040, and the A700 100% improvement in IOPs at half the latency of a AFF8080. Not a bad step up in performance.

ONTAP 9.1 – What’s New

Stay tuned for more blog posts on a full breakdown of what’s new in ONTAP 9.1. For now here are some of the key highlights in the 9.1 release:

Update: ONTAP 9.1RC1 now available to download from NetApp Here: http://mysupport.netapp.com/NOW/download/software/ontap/9.1RC1/

Along with support for the new gen of hardware are two huge new features – Volume based encryption and “FlexGroups”.

NetApp Volume Encryption

Finally! Encryption on FAS and AFF arrays that do not require special disk drives!

Key Features:

Software encrypt any volume, any disk, any system
FAS, AFF, and ONTAP® Select
Lower cost: no need for hardware self-encrypting drives
More granular: volume level
Onboard key manager
Leverage storage efficiency features
Deduplication, compression, compaction
Future proof encryption solution
Software updates will keep the algorithms up to date

Some Additional Note on the new Volume Encryption Feature:

Unique protection for every data volume
• XTS-AES-256 data encryption key per volume
• Node root and SVM root volumes are not encrypted

$0 license required to enable NVE
• Encryption keys are stored and protected by Onboard Key Manager (OKM) – OKM included with ONTAP 9 at no cost

Supported platforms:
• AFF8000 and new AFF platforms
• FAS8000, FAS6280/90, and new FAS platforms
• Encrypting an existing volume
• Re-keying and decrypting a volume is done via a volume move operation
• FIPS 140-2 Level 2 compliance
• NetApp Storage Encryption (NSE) systems and external KMIP server still required

NetApp FlexGroups: massively scalable, high-performance data container

If you’re familiar with NetApp’s seldom used feature called “Infinite Volume” you will instantly recognize what NetApp is trying to do with FlexGroups. FlexGroups basically fix all the shortcomings of Infinite Volume and add a whole lot more to the picture.

The goal of FlexGroups is to create a Single Name Space that meets the following goals:

Linear scale for performance and capacity
Scales to 20PB and 400 billion files
Operational simplicity
Single mount point with automated load and space distribution
Consistent high performance
Predictable, consistent low latency
All-flash containers
Leading resiliency
ONTAP® nondisruptive operations
Flexibility to scale as you grow
6x performance gain
50% lower cost compared to nearest competitor
Inline efficiency guarantees with AFF

FlexGroup — Target Industries and Workloads

Software Dev
Software build environments
Product design
Product Dev/PLM
Life Sciences
Semiconductor logic design and physical design workflows
Seismic processing and interpretation
Rendering and post production
Genomics scanning/ingest, sequencing, interpretation/visualization

More to come of this feature as we get our hands on it in our labs.

That’s it for now folks! Stay tuned for the latest updates coming out of NetApp Insight 2016!