NetApp

I mentioned earlier that NetApp seems to be offering the same old SAN as EMC. This is only partially true. I mentioned two problems from the EMC and below is how NetApp addresses them.

• LUN Tetris: NetApp stripes either SATA or SAS drives across a large RAID6 and aggregates them together so that you have large storage pools of a single type, e.g. one for SATA and one for SAS. You can then compute the amount of available disk by subtracting from a total number. You can also have nothing but SATA and the large stripe can address performance problems associated with SATA, however getting IOPS stats first is a good idea. Else a small pool of SAS could address the need for fast disk.
• SP Bottle Neck: NetApp has the same problem here. One smart SP and several disk only drawers. They do offer PAM modules which add 256G (depending on which head) of cache to increase performance. When upgrading SPs remember that changing out an SP is easier if you have zoned by port number, not WWN.

A FAS3140 will max out at 420T of raw capacity with all SATA. So SP upgrades seem further away for my organization's current usage. Regardless, this design is not as elegant as grid storage and if I'm going to consider it they'll need to offer a good price.