ESG-Lab Validation Report Netapp E-Series

Lab Validation
Report
NetApp E-Series Storage Systems
Performance Efficiency in Consolidated Application-driven Environments
By Tony Palmer, Senior Lab Analyst
May 2014
2014 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Lab Validation: NetApp E-Series
Contents
Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 3
Background ............................................................................................................................................................... 3
NetApp E-Series ........................................................................................................................................................ 3
ESG Lab Validation ........................................................................................................................................ 5

Getting Started ......................................................................................................................................................... 5
Mixed Workload Scalability ...................................................................................................................................... 8
Dynamic Disk Pools ................................................................................................................................................. 12
ESG Lab Validation Highlights ..................................................................................................................... 16

Issues to Consider ....................................................................................................................................... 16
The Bigger Truth ......................................................................................................................................... 17
Appendix ..................................................................................................................................................... 18
ESG Lab Reports

The goal of ESG Lab reports is to educate IT professionals about data center technology products for
companies of all types and sizes. ESG Lab reports are not meant to replace the evaluation process that should
be conducted before making purchasing decisions, but rather to provide insight into these emerging
technologies. Our objective is to go over some of the more valuable feature/functions of products, show how
they can be used to solve real customer problems and identify any areas needing improvement. ESG Lab's
expert third-party perspective is based on our own hands-on testing as well as on interviews with customers
who use these products in production environments. This ESG Lab report was sponsored by NetApp.
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Introduction
This ESG Lab Validation Report presents the hands-on evaluation and testing results of NetApp E-Series SAN storage
systems in an enterprise mixed-workload environment with multiple virtualized servers and applications sharing a
consolidated NetApp E-Series storage infrastructure. ESG Lab focused on performance, scalability, and efficiency of
the E-Series platform.
Background
IT managers, line-of-business stakeholders and senior executives continue to look for ways to improve resource
utilization and ROI in IT. In addition, IT is faced with managing a wide variety of projects all deemed important to
the business. According to ESG research, a number of these involve virtualization technologies, as Figure 1
demonstrates. Increased use of server virtualization, improving backup and recovery, managing data growth (a
perennial focus), desktop virtualization, and data center consolidation are all among the top ten most important IT
priorities reported by ESG research respondents for the next 12 months. These responses indicate that IT is facing
increasing pressure to improve efficiency while delivering non-stop application and data access and protection.1
Figure 1. Top Ten 2014 IT Priorities
Top 10 most important IT priorities over the next 12 months. (Percent of

respondents, N=562, ten responses accepted)
Information security initiatives
32%
Increased use of server virtualization
32%
Improve data backup and recovery
29%
Manage data growth
25%
Desktop virtualization
24%
Use cloud infrastructure services
23%
Regulatory compliance initiatives
23%
Major application deployments or upgrades
23%
Business intelligence/data analytics initiatives
23%
Data center consolidation
22%
0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
25%
30%
35%
Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, 2014.
NetApp E-Series
NetApp E-Series storage systems are designed to provide terabytes to petabytes of robust, highly available, scalable
modular storage. With the E-Series, NetApp set out to build a flexible, modular system to enable custom
configurations that can be optimized for a wide variety of applications and scale performance and capacity as
needed. The NetApp E-Series offers three types of disk drive/controller shelves, multiple disk and SSD drive types,
and host connectivity using quad-lane 12Gb SAS, 10GbE iSCSI, 16GFC, and 40Gb InfiniBand.
The NetApp E2700 is aimed at remote office, branch office, and midsized organizations, scaling to 768TB of capacity
in a single system, while the E5500scaling to 1.54PBis designed for larger midmarket and enterprise organizations
with more demanding requirements. Both models are designed to reduce data center footprint while supporting
1
Source: ESG Research Report, 2014 IT Spending Intentions Survey, February 2014.
I/O intensive mixed workloads and databases, high-performance file systems, and throughput-intensive streaming
applications while maintaining high availability.
NetApp E-Series storage systems run NetApp SANtricity storage management software, which provides advanced
storage functionality, including dynamic drive rebalancing, RAID and Dynamic Disk Pool (DDP) management, cache
tiering, and extended data protection, including snapshots, remote replication, and disaster recovery.
Figure 2. The NetApp E-Series Portfolio
The NetApp E2700 and E5500 build on the field-proven reliability of the NetApp E-Series architecture, with more
than 750,000 storage systems deployed world-wide. Supporting up to 12GB/sec of throughput, the key capabilities
of the NetApp E-Series include:
Advanced recovery capabilities, including snapshots and volume copies.

Advanced availability capabilities, including dual controllers and remote replication.
Dynamic Disk Pools (DDP) data protection technology, designed to simplify traditional RAID management
by distributing data parity information and spare capacity across a large pool of drives.
Four native quad-lane 12Gb/sec SAS host interfaces in the E2700, expanding up to eight total interfaces in
the E5500.
Up to eight additional 10GbE iSCSI host interfaces.
Up to eight additional 16GFC host interfaces.
Up to four 40Gb/sec InfiniBand interfaces in the E5500.
High-speed SAS, cost-effective nearline SAS, self-encrypting, or solid state drives up to 192 drives in the
E2700 and 384 drives in the E5500.
Up to 120 SSDs in the E2700 and E5500.
3.5 and 2.5 inch drive enclosures.
Up to 16GB of cache in the E2700, up to 24GB of cache in the E5500.
A growing set of application-aware management plug-ins provide tight integration with management tools from
Microsoft, VMware, Oracle and others. Plug-ins simplify the management of E-Series storage with built-in
provisioning, monitoring, event management, and advanced data recovery. Advanced storage functionality is
provided in the form of thin provisioning, snapshot technology, VAAI integration and Dynamic Disk Pools.
ESG Lab Validation

ESG Lab performed hands-on evaluation and testing of the NetApp E-series both remotely and at a NetApp facility
in Boulder, Colorado. Testing was designed to examine the real-world performance and seamless scalability of the
E-Series platform when shared by multiple virtual servers running a mix of real-world application workloads.
Getting Started
ESG Lab started with a pre-wired test bed as summarized in Figure 3. Three industry-standard x86 servers were
connected via 16GFC to one NetApp E2700 Storage System and one NetApp E5500 Storage System2. The NetApp
E2700 was configured with 60 900GB 10K RPM SAS drives. The NetApp E5500 was configured with 84 900GB 10K
RPM SAS drives and 12 800GB SSDs, for a total of 96 drives. The servers were configured with VMware vSphere 5.1
with Windows 2008 R2 virtual machines installed on each server.
Figure 3. The ESG Lab Test Bed
ESG Lab Testing

In a way, storage system benchmark testing is like an analysis of the performance of a car. Specifications including
horsepower and acceleration from zero to sixty are a good first pass indicator of a cars performance. While
specifications provide a good starting point, there are a variety of other factors that should be taken into
consideration including the condition of the road, the skill of the driver and gas mileage ratings. Much like buying a
car, a test drive with real-world application traffic is the best way to determine how a storage system will perform
in real-world conditions.
ESG Lab performance testing began with evaluation of low level IOPS and throughput characterization tests of the
E-Series platform with a hybrid configuration including SSDs and 10K RPM disks using the open source Iometer
2
Configuration details can be found in the Appendix.
workload generation utility. I/O per second, or IOPS, is a measure of the number of operations that a storage
system can perform. When a system is able to deliver a large number of IOPS, it will tend to be able to service more
applications and users in parallel. Throughput is an indicator of the available bandwidth and data-moving
capabilities of a storage system. Iometer profiles of 4KB random reads and 512KB sequential reads were used for
this first pass analysis of the raw aggregate IOPS and throughput capabilities of the NetApp E-Series platform.
Figure 4 shows the IOPS and throughput achieved by the NetApp E5500 SSD/HDD hybrid system in our test bed.
160,000
16,000
140,000
14,000
120,000
12,000
100,000
10,000
80,000
8,000
60,000
6,000
40,000
4,000
20,000
2,000
MB/sec
IOPS
Figure 4. NetApp E5500 Read IOPS and Throughput
IOPS
4 KB random read
Throughput
512 KB seq read
To translate these results to a more real-world experience, ESG Lab used the Orion utility from Oracle to generate
database traffic. Orion is a lightweight tool that is designed for measuring storage performance, and is intended to
help administrators understand the performance capabilities of a storage system running common database
application workloads, either to uncover performance issues or to size a new database installation without having
to create and run an Oracle database. Orion is typically used to measure two types of database activity: responsetime sensitive on-line transaction processing (OLTP) and bandwidth intensive on-line analytic processing (OLAP).
Figure 5 depicts the results of the Orion tests run on the hybrid E5500 using just 12 SSD drives.
120,000
2,400
100,000
2,000
80,000
1,600
60,000
1,200
40,000
800
20,000
400
MB/sec
IOPS
Figure 5. NetApp E5500 OLTP and OLAP Performance
0
IOPS
Throughput
E5500 OLTP & OLAP Performance

The detailed results are presented in Table 1.
Table 1. NetApp E5500 Performance Details
E5500 Disk IOPS and Throughput

NetApp E5500
Workload
IOPS
IOPS
Throughput
IOPS
Throughput
4KB Random Read

512KB Sequential Read
OLTP (8KB I/O)
OLAP (1MB I/O)
146,610
N/A
97,700
N/A
Response
Time(ms)
4.4
N/A
0.56
N/A
Throughput
(MB/sec)
N/A
12,087
N/A
2,361
Response
Time(ms)
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
What the Numbers Mean
IOPS is a measure of the storage systems ability to process small, transactional operations. Storage
throughput is a measure of the available bandwidth provided by the storage system.
ESG Labs testing did not attempt to determine the maximum IOPS that the storage system could sustain;
the tests are designed to have poor locality of reference in order to stress the storage system.
ESG Lab confirmed that the E5500 was able to provide 146,610 small block random IOPS as well as
throughput of 12GB/sec for large block sequential reads. This was accomplished with an average host
response time of just 4.4ms, and with just 84 SAS drives, indicating a very efficient storage engine.
Using an Oracle Orion simulation of the disk I/O in real-world database environments, ESG Lab confirmed
that the E5500 was able to provide 97,700 IOPS in an OLTP scenario with average response times of just
.56ms, and 2.36GB/sec throughput in an OLAP scenario.
12GB/sec represents approximately double the maximum bandwidth of the previous generation NetApp ESeries.
Why This Matters

A storage system needs a strong engine and well-designed architecture to perform predictably in a real-world,
mixed workload environment. One measure of the strength of a storage controller engine is its maximum IOPS
and throughput. ESG Lab confirmed that a NetApp E-Series storage system can sustain more than 146,000
small block random IOPS and an excellent 12GB/sec of aggregate large block sequential read throughput.
Database performance was excellent as well, sustaining nearly 100,000 OLTP IOPS with sub-millisecond
response times.
In ESG Labs experience, these are impressive results for a dual controller modular storage system. These results
suggest that the E-Series is well suited for consolidated enterprise environments with highly virtualized servers
running demanding transaction processing, mixed workload and high-bandwidth applications like analytics and
backup to disk.
Mixed Workload Scalability

Conventional server benchmarks were designed to measure the performance of a single application running on a
single operating system inside a single physical computer. Much like traditional server benchmarks, conventional
storage system benchmarks were designed to measure the performance of a single storage system running a single
application workload. The SPC-1 benchmark, developed and managed by the Storage Performance Council, is a
great example of a traditional storage benchmark. SPC-1 was designed to assess the performance capabilities of a
single storage system as it services the workload of a single online interactive database application. As exemplified
in these business critical database applications, SPC-1 generates random I/O, simulating queries and updates.
Traditional benchmarks running a single application workload can't help IT understand what happens when a mix of
applications are deployed together on shared storage in a virtual server environment.
ESG Lab storage-focused benchmarking uses multiple servers attached to a single storage system. Rather than
running application-level benchmarks, which stress the CPU and memory of the server, lower level industry
standard benchmarks are used with a goal of measuring the maximum mixed workload capabilities of a single
storage system. Industry standard tools were used to emulate the I/O activity of four common business-critical
application workloads:
E-mail: The Microsoft Jetstress 2013 utility was used to generate e-mail storage traffic. Simulating the
activity of typical Microsoft Exchange users as they send and read e-mails, make appointments and manage
to-do lists, the Jetstress utility is recommended by Microsoft to verify the performance and stability of a
disk subsystem prior to putting an Exchange server into production.
Database: The Orion utility from Oracle was used to generate database traffic. Orion was designed to help
administrators understand the performance capabilities of a storage system for databases without having
to create and run an Oracle database. Orion is typically used to measure two types of database activity:
response-time sensitive on-line transaction processing (OLTP) and bandwidth intensive on-line analytic
processing (OLAP).
File Services: The industry standard Iometer utility was used to emulate the I/O activity of typical corporate
users accessing file shares. This I/O characterization was composed of 100% random reads of various block
sizes. The file services Iometer profile used for this test was originally distributed by Intel, the author of
Iometer. Iometer has since become an open source project.3
Backup Reader: The industry standard Iometer utility was used to generate simulated backup traffic. The
I/O characterization was composed of 20% random, 100% read, 64KB I/O. With this I/O profile, throughput
is the important metric, and total throughput was calculated by multiplying IOPS by the I/O block size.
All tests were performed on Windows physical drives running over VMware VMDK devices.
3
http://sourceforge.net/projects/iometer/
ESG Lab Testing

ESG Lab next measured mixed workload performance by generating four application workloads on four virtual
machines then scaling to eight, and finally 16 workloads on 16 virtual machines. With a mix of random and
sequential, plus read and write I/O, the goal was not to record the largest IOPS number possible, but to make an
assessment of the ability of the NetApp E2700 to perform as an increasing number of applications are consolidated
onto a single storage system. The scalability of mixed workload activity is illustrated in Figure 6.
70
12,000
60
10,000
50
8,000
40
6,000
30
4,000
20
2,000
10
IOPS
14,000
Milliseconds
Figure 6. NetApp E2700 Mixed Workload Scaling
0
Four Workers
File Services
Backup
Eight Workers
OLTP
E-mail
16 Workers
Average Response Time (ms)
As shown above, performance scaled nearly linearly as application workloads were brought online, with response
time staying nearly flat. The detailed results, including the Orion OLAP throughput results, are presented in Table 2.
Table 2. NetApp E2700 Performance Details
Four Workers
NetApp E2700
File Services
Backup
OLTP
OLAP
Mail
Average
Response Time
IOPS per Drive
Performance
505 IOPS
169 IOPS
11MB/sec
714 IOPS
138MB/sec
1,759 IOPS
Response
Time (ms)
31.7
Eight Workers
13.6
Performance
1,173 IOPS
424 IOPS
28MB/sec
1,583 IOPS
325MB/sec
3,340 IOPS
N/A
17.5
262 IOPS
N/A
N/A
7.3
Response
Time (ms)
27.8
16 Workers
Response
Time (ms)
30.5
15.1
Performance
2,106 IOPS
1,158 IOPS
74MB/sec
3,070 IOPS
493MB/sec
5,979 IOPS
N/A
16.5
N/A
18.7
272 IOPS
N/A
257 IOPS
N/A
N/A
6.5
N/A
7.0
18.5
10
What the Numbers Mean
ESG Labs mixed workload testing did not attempt to determine the maximum throughput or IOPS that the
storage system can sustain; the tests are designed to have poor locality of reference in order to stress the
storage system.
The workload represents a typical mix seen in many enterprise environments. Actual performance may be
different based on the specific characteristics of the applications and environment. Better locality of
reference, for example, would facilitate higher cache hit rates and better performance.
The NetApp E2700 scaled smoothly from four to 16 application workloads and supported a mixed
virtualized environment with OLTP database, OLAP database, Microsoft Exchange, file services, and backup
simulations while average response time at the host stayed nearly flat, which suggests that the system has
reserves to scale further.
The NetApp E2700 delivered consistently high IOPS per drive as workloads and drives were added.
Figure 7 shows Microsoft Exchange results that were recorded with other workloads running on the E2700
simultaneously.
25,000
25
20,000
20
15,000
15
10,000
10
5,000
ms
Mailboxes
Figure 7. Exchange Scalability in a Mixed Workload Environment
12 Drives
24 Drives
Mailboxes
48 Drives
Response Time(ms)
ESG Lab looked more closely at the e-mail component of our tests and found that a dedicated E2700 with just 48
SAS drives in the same configuration as our tested system could comfortably scale to support roughly 31,000 1GB
Exchange mailboxes with response times staying below 20ms.
Handling Throughput Spikes with Ease

As noticed during IOPS monitoring, peaks of throughput activity could be correlated to the periodic behavior of
real-world applications. During the Jetstress test runs, a burst of aggregate throughput was observed during the
Jetstress database consistency check. A VMware vSphere view of mixed workload performance on one of the
servers is shown in Figure 8.
Figure 8. Throughput Spike-Jetstress Database Consistency Check
As throughput intensified during the Jetstress database consistency check, bandwidth utilization for other
workloads operating in parallel remained steady.
Why This Matters

ESG research indicates that desktop and server virtualization are among the most-cited IT priorities for the
organizations surveyed by ESG.4 Predictable performance scalability is a critical concern when multiple systems
running diverse applications share a storage system. A burst of I/O activity in one application can lead to poor
response times and lost productivity for other users. A highly virtualized server environment presents one of the
most diverse and challenging mixes of application types and I/O access patterns to a storage system.
Its a significant challenge for IT to meet service level requirements for business-critical applications, especially
for I/O-intensive OLTP and e-mail deployments with strict response time requirements.
NetApp E-Series storage systems offer consistently scalable performance with low response times in the mixed
workload scenarios typical of many of todays virtualized enterprise environments. ESG Lab testing has validated
that as a growing number of applications are consolidated in a virtual server environment, the balanced
performance of the NetApp E-Series scales. The performance scaling is consistent and predictable, allowing IT to
plan and grow the storage environment as the business needs change.
Source: ESG Research Report, 2014 IT Spending Intentions Survey, February 2014.
11
12
Dynamic Disk Pools

NetApp Dynamic Disk Pools (DDP) is a data protection scheme designed to provide greater simplicity, flexibility, and
availability than traditional RAID. DDP distributes data, parity information, and spare capacity across a pool of
drives, defining which drives are used for segment placement to ensure data is fully protected. Disk Pools can be
flexibly sized, from 11 to 384 drives to provide optimal utilization of virtually any configuration. DDP is designed to
deliver and maintain high performance while recovering from a drive failure.
Figure 9 shows how a 24 disk storage system might be laid out using traditional RAID. While traditional RAID can
protect against single or double drive failures, and utilize hot spares to facilitate rebuilds of failed drives without
waiting for a replacement, there are tradeoffs with traditional RAID.
Figure 9. Traditional RAID Group Layout
As seen in Figure 9, Traditional RAID requires an administrator to allocate drives to RAID groups and designate
dedicated drives as hot spares, which sit idle until invoked after a drive failure. In the case of a drive failure, the
remaining drives in a RAID group must rebuild the data from the failed drive while performing application I/O . This
process can take many hours to days, depending on the size of the drives and the activity of the servers accessing
volumes in the RAID group.
With DDP, all disks are utilized in a pool, with volumes spread across all drives in a random 10-drive (8+2) per
segment basis as shown in Figure 10. Note that the spare capacity on each drive is available for allocation into a
new pool or for use in a rebuild of a failed drive. Essentially, every disk in a pool is a hot Spare and all disks share
in the rebuild. Another benefit of DDP is that only actual volume data needs to be rebuilt after a drive failure.
13
Figure 10. NetApp Dynamic Disk Pool Layout
ESG Lab Testing

First ESG Lab tested IOPS performance of an E2700 Array Configured with DDP and Traditional RAID. The traditional
RAID configuration contained a mix of RAID5, RAID1, and RAID10 volumes, based on application best practices. The
DDP configuration had 48 drives in a single Dynamic Disk Pool, with all application volumes carved from that single
pool. The allocated capacity and volume sizes were identical for both configurations.
Figure 11. Performance Impact of Dynamic Disk Pools
16,000
14,899
14,993
48 Drives-Dynamic Disk Pools
48 Drives-Traditional RAID
14,000
12,000
IOPS
10,000
8,000
6,000
4,000
2,000
0
As seen in Figure 11, performance was nearly identical, with less than 100 IOPS separating the performance of the
two configurations.
Next, ESG Lab simulated a drive failure during production hours by running a two-hour Jetstress Exchange
simulation for 18,500 mailboxes and an Oracle OLAP workload while pulling a drive. Figure 12 shows the mixed
14
storage workload being generated by the virtual machines from the vSphere console. Its important to note that
the Exchange workload stayed stable even when the OLAP workload kicked off with large block sequential I/O.
Figure 12. VMware vSphere Performance Graph
As seen in Figure 13, performance for DDP was virtually unaffected, with response time increasing by just 4.9%.
While the RAID failed drive recovery resulted in a 9.1% increase in response time.
20,000
40
18,000
36
16,000
32
14,000
28
12,000
24
10,000
20
8,000
16
6,000
12
4,000
2,000
0
RAID
Normal Operation
Failure Recovery
DDP
RAID Response Time
DDP Response Time
Response Time (ms)
Mailboxes
Figure 13. Dynamic Disk Pool Failed Drive Recovery Impact
15
As seen in Table 3, the failed drive recovery completed within two hours using DDP, but took nearly 5 hours in a
traditional RAID group.
Table 3. NetApp Exchange Failed Drive Recovery Impact with Dynamic Disk Pools
Mailboxes
E2700 (48 Drives) DDP

E2700 (48 Drives) RAID
Normal
Operation
18,500
18,500
900 GB Failed Disk Recovery

Time
Failed Drive
Recovery
18,500
18,500
Response Time
Normal
Operation
18.7
17.1
Failed Drive
Recovery
19.7
18.7
%
Change
4.9%
9.1%
Traditional RAID
Dynamic Disk Pools
5 Hours
2 Hours
Why This Matters

As storage environments grow in size and complexity, so too does the impact of data outages. ESG asked
organizations how much downtime they could tolerate for their tier-1 data. More than half (53%) of
respondents indicated that access to their tier-1 data could not be interrupted for more than one hour without
causing adverse business impact. Even more telling is the fact that nearly one-fifth (17%) of organizations flat
out stated that any downtime was unacceptable for their tier-1 data.5 Since lack of application availability can
result in missed business opportunities, reduced productivity, lost revenue, dissatisfied customers, damage to
the companys reputation, and even legal liability, it follows that maintaining uptime and data access are crucial
for business productivity.
Global operations demand 24x7 data access, leaving no window for planned or unplanned downtime. Server
and storage consolidation magnify the need for high availability and reliability because a hardware outage will
affect many systems and applications, not just one.
ESG Lab confirmed that NetApp Dynamic Disk Pools, implemented in NetApp E-Series arrays were able to
provide the same level of small-block, random IOPS as a more traditional RAID configuration. ESG Lab also
validated DDPs ability to substantially reduce both response times and failed drive recovery times.
Source: ESG Research Report, Trends in Data Protection Modernization, August 2012.
16
ESG Lab Validation Highlights

ESG Lab confirmed that a hybrid NetApp E5500 storage system with 84 10K RPM SAS and 12 SSD drives was
able to sustain an excellent 12GB/sec of aggregate large block throughput.
The same hybrid NetApp E5500 system was able to deliver more than 146,000 small block random IOPS
with the same complement of 10K RPM SAS and SSD drives.
The NetApp E2700 delivered consistently high IOPS per drive as workloads and drives were added,
demonstrating efficient utilization of back-end storage to satisfy application demands.
ESG Lab testing has validated that the balanced performance of the NetApp E-Series scaled predictably as a
growing number of applications are consolidated in a virtual server environment.
ESG Lab confirmed that NetApp Dynamic Disk Pools were able to combine the same level of small-block,
random IOPS as a more traditional RAID configuration with ability to substantially reduce disk rebuild times.
Issues to Consider
Generally accepted best practices and predominantly default VMware and NetApp E-Series settings were
used during the design of this test. As expected after any benchmark of this magnitude, deep analysis of
the results indicates that tuning would probably yield slighter higher absolute results. Given that the goal of
this test was not to generate a the largest numbers possible, ESG Lab is confident that the results
presented in this report meet the objective of estimating performance scalability and responsiveness as a
growing number of virtual machines share a consolidated pool of NetApp E-Series storage.
The test results/data presented in this document are based on industry-standard benchmarks deployed
together in a controlled environment. Due to the many variables in each production data center
environment, it is still important to perform capacity planning and testing in your own environment to
validate a storage system configuration.
17
The Bigger Truth

Server virtualization is being deployed by a growing number of organizations to lower costs, improve resource
utilization, provide non-disruptive upgrades, and increase availability. Each benefit is fundamentally enabled by decoupling servers, applications, and data from specific physical assets. Storage virtualization takes those very same
benefits and extends them from servers to the underlying storage domainbringing IT organizations one step
closer to the ideal of a completely virtualized IT infrastructure.
While the benefits of a completely virtualized infrastructure are obvious to most IT managers, performance and
manageability are real concerns. Server, storage, and application administrators are looking for answers to a
number of questions:
Can we meet performance service level agreements for a mix of business-critical applications?
Does the storage system have the horsepower to serve mixed real-world applications?
Can the storage system scale to accommodate future growth and consolidation?
The NetApp E-Series, with up to 1.54PB of high-bandwidth back end storage capacity and a flexible mix of nextgeneration 12Gb/sec SAS, 10GbE iSCSI, 16GFC, and 40Gb/sec InfiniBand host connectivity options, is ideally suited
for consolidation and virtualization in medium-sized businesses, mid-range enterprise environments, and remote
sites.
ESG Lab confirmed that the performance and scalability of the NetApp E-Series is well suited for a mix of
applications running in a consolidated enterprise virtual server environment. A single NetApp E2700 simultaneously
supported 49,828 simulated Exchange 2013 mailboxes, 3,070 Oracle Orion small database I/Os per second, 493
MB/sec of throughput for large OLAP Oracle Orion operations, and 2,106 simulated file server IOPSall while
delivering predictably fast response times.
The hybrid NetApp E5500 was able to deliver 146,610 4KB read IOPS with 4.4ms response times and 12GB/sec of
streaming throughput. When presented with a more real-world workload, the E5500 supported 97,700 8KB
database I/Os per second with sub-millisecond average response times and 2.36GB/sec of throughput for online
analytics. These results demonstrate the suitability of the E-Series platform for demanding enterprise environments
with a wide variety of business critical workloads.
ESG Lab confirmed that the growing family of freely available NetApp E-Series application aware plug-ins can be
used to provision and manage data and storage from an application perspective. The VMware vCenter plug-in
makes it easy to monitor and provision storage from a VMware virtual server administration console. The site
recovery adapter for VMware site recovery manager makes is easy to define, automate, and test the remote
recovery of applications running in virtual machines. Management framework plug-ins for Oracle Enterprise
Manager and Microsoft System Center Operation Manager (SCOM) make it easy to monitor and manage storage
from an infrastructure level. These capabilities, along with a growing family of application-specific snapshot and
cluster failover tools, can be used to simplify storage management using a single pane of glass that administrators
are familiar with.
ESG Lab is pleased to report that the NetApp E-Series delivers simple, efficient, consistently high performance,
modular flexibility, and high density along with advanced functionalitythin provisioning, enhanced snapshots, VAAI
support, and Dynamic Disk Pools. NetApp E-Series is clearly well-suited to support a mix of demanding real-world
business applications running in a highly consolidated virtual server infrastructure; its modular enough for
midmarket organizations, scalable enough for the enterprise.
18
Appendix
Table 4. Test Bed Overview
Storage
NetApp E2700
60 900GB 10K SAS drives

16GFC host connect
84 900GB 10K SAS drives
12 800GB SSDs
16GFC host connect
NetApp E5500
Servers
Three Dell R420 servers
Dual hex-core Intel E5-2420 processors, 48 GB of RAM
Host Bus Adapters

16GFC Dual-port HBA
Virtualization Software and Guest Operating Systems

Server Virtualization
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.1
Guest OS
Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition 64 bit
Virtual Machine and Drive Configuration

NetApp E-Series disk capacity was used for all storage capacity including VMware virtual disk files (VMDK),
Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system images, application executables, and application data. The operating
system images were installed on VMDK volumes.
Application data and log volumes were configured as RAID-1 volumes. Guest operating system volumes were
configured using RAID-5 volumes. Volume ownership was balanced across the dual controllers and distributed
evenly over the six host interfaces. The volumes were spread evenly over two VMware host groups with a multipath
policy of most recently used (MRU).
19
Table 5. Benchmark Utilities/Workload Generators

Characterization
E-Mail
Database Workload Generator
File Server
Backup Reader
Iometer, version 2006.07.27

Dynamo clients ran within sixteen guest VMs running on
three Dell R420 servers with Windows Server 2012 as the
guest operating system. Forty-eight LUNs, built with 48
SAS drives, were tested. Each of the LUNs was tested as a
physical drive over raw device mapped volumes in a
VMware vSphere environment (ESX 5.1). The servers
worked in parallel accessing the NetApp E2700 and E5500
systems through six FC interfaces negotiated at 16GFC.
Maximum throughput was measured using 512KB
sequential reads. One worker, sixteen outstanding I/Os
per physical drive.
Microsoft Jetstress, version 15.0.775.0
Mailboxes 5000
Mailbox size 180MB
IOPS per mailbox 0.12
Thread 32
Log buffers 9000
Min DB cache 64MB
Max DB cache 512MB
Insert operations 40%
Delete operations 30%
Replace operations 5%
Read operations 25%
Lazy commits 55%
Oracle Orion, version 10.2.0.1.0
Small I/O size: 8KB
Large I/O size: 1024 KB
I/O Types: Small Random, Large Random
Simulated Array Type: RAID 0
Num_disks: 3 per instance
Stripe Depth: 1024KB
Write: 30%
Duration for each Data Point: 150 seconds
Four workers, four outstanding I/Os per physical drive
100% random reads, assorted block sizes
One worker, one outstanding I/O per physical drive
80% sequential reads, 64KB block size
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ESG-Lab Validation Report Netapp E-Series

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Lab Validation

By Tony Palmer, Senior Lab Analyst

2014 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Lab Validation: NetApp E-Series

ESG Lab Validation ........................................................................................................................................ 5

ESG Lab Validation Highlights ..................................................................................................................... 16

ESG Lab Reports

2014 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Lab Validation: NetApp E-Series

Top 10 most important IT priorities over the next 12 months. (Percent of

Increased use of server virtualization

Improve data backup and recovery

Manage data growth

Use cloud infrastructure services

Regulatory compliance initiatives

Major application deployments or upgrades

Business intelligence/data analytics initiatives

Data center consolidation

Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, 2014.

2014 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Lab Validation: NetApp E-Series

Advanced recovery capabilities, including snapshots and volume copies.

Lab Validation: NetApp E-Series