EMC Celerra NS Series Vs.

Netapp FAS Series

Spec Comparison
Specifications NetApp FAS/V-Series EMC Celerra NS Series
DART
Operating
Data ONTAP
System (Data Access in Real
Time)
File System WAFL UxFS
Simple
Management & Yes Yes1[1]
Installation
High
Performance Yes No2[2]
RAID 6
Snapshots in
Yes Yes
base system
Rapid recovery
SnapRestore SnapSure
from Snapshots
Flexible Volumes FlexVol Celerra AVM3[3]
Integrated
FlexClone No
Cloning
Workload
FlexShare No
Prioritization
Virtualized
MultiStore Virtual Data Movers
Partitions
Celerra Replicator /
Mirroring SnapMirror
MirrorView4[4]
Max. systems in
2 2-85[5]
a cluster

1[1] Celerra Unisphere delivers not all functionality

2[2] EMC delivers RAID 6 but with performance penalties

3[3] Without the ability to shrink volumes

4[4] Celerra Replicator for NAS/iSCSI, MirrorView for FC/iSCSI

5[5] NS-120 w/ 2 Data Mover, NS-480 up to 4, NS-960 up to 8. One Data Mover is passive for failover
Competitive Alignment
NetApp EMC
FAS2040
NS-120
FAS2050
FAS3140
NS-480
FAS3160
FAS3170
NS-960
FAS60×0

Feature Comparison
Feature Notes
Efficiency NetApp: High-performance RAID DP with
industry leading space efficiency.

EMC: Use of standard RAID 10 or 5 with

performance and capacity limits.
EMC Competitive Analysis

Overview

 Recognized brand, large installed base

 >50% of sales are through channel and OEMs, including Dell and Fujitsu-Siemens
 40% revenue increase YoY

Strengths

 N+1 clustering for high availability

 “All-in-one” NAS, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel connectivity
 File-level deduplication
 File-level retention (FLR), similar to SnapLock Enterprise
 Thin Provisioning with Automated Volume Manager
 Fully Automatic Storage Tiering (FAST) with FileMover Appliance for files
 Unified Management GUI with Celerra Unisphere
 Disk spin down

Weaknesses

 At least two operating systems to manage

 DART on Celerra
 FLARE on CLARiiON
 RedHat Linux on Celerra Control Station
 No true Unified Storage
 Weak performance with Out-of-the-box install
 20% less performance with RAID-6 compared to RAID-5
 Highest Availability (5×9s) only for CLARiiON
 Async replication process for NAS with non-transparent failover
 Deduplication not supported on iSCSI and with VMware
 CLARiiON virtually provisioned LUNs are not supported and cannot be provisioned to
Celerra
 Limited SSD drive capability (15 per NS-120/NS-480, 30 per NS-960)
 With FLR-C (Compliance) a CLARiiON admin can still delete the underlying LUN

Why NetApp vs. EMC

 Highest performance in per-node throughput and overall response time

 Highly efficient snapshots
 FAS/V-Series exceeds NS performance as reported via third-party specSFS
benchmark results
 Lower total cost of ownership
 IDC Storage Tracker reports NetApp NAS cost less than EMC NAS quarterly and
YoY
 FlexVol and RAID-DP greatly increases utilization
 Simple upgrade path
  More cost-effective mirroring and disaster recovery
 Simplest to manage
 One management interface
 Less equipment to manage
 Less software to configure
 Highly reliable and available
 FAS/V-Series meets and exceeds Five 9’s availability validated by IDC report
 RAID-DP provides tolerance to multiple simultaneous disk failures without
performance penalities commonly found in competitor RAID 6 deployments
 Choice of FAS/V-Series asynchorous, synchronous or semi-synchronous
mirroring versus NS asynchronous approach for file replication
 Easily, quickly recover from errors and disasters
 No single point of failure vs EMC NS Control Station or active/active controller
configurations
 NetApp Cloud, NDDC and ITaaS provides non-disruptive availability of business data
and repeatable processes
 Muitlstore provides secure and transparent pools of storage, with Lifetime Key
management with Decru
 Operations, Protection and Provisioing Managers provide seamless cloud-
enabled automated provisioining and management
 SANScreen provides superior capacity management and chargeback
 Data Motion enables movement of storage pools non-disruptively

Questions To Ask

Storage Utilization

· What level of thin provisioning does EMC NS provide?

· How does EMC’s double parity RAID 6 perform?

· How much capacity does EMC need for SnapClone?

Disaster Recovery

· Should I use SnapSure or SnapView?

· How do you do backup and recovery from snapshots?

Performance

· Does Celerra do workload prioritization like FlexShare?

· How many Snapshots can I take without any performance loss?

Reliability & Availability

· What level of availability can I expect from EMC NS and what third-party has validated
this? Four 9’s? Five 9’s? Six 9’s?

· How do you protect against a double disk failure while ensuring performance? Can you
do it without mirroring the RAID groups?

Archival and Compliance (if EMC proposes Celerra plus Centera)

· Wouldn’t it make sense to include a CAS/compliance option on existing storage

platforms (like NetApp does with SnapLock)?

· How many dissimilar management interfaces and software are required?

Enterprise-ready requirements

· What is your strategy to support automatic disaster recovery?

Support

· How will you support my 24×7 production environment – go through partners that
support other vendors?