I recently had an opportunity to compare Solaris and NetApp as a NAS Gateway. This is part of my series comparing various operating systems as potential NAS gateways to store VMDK files accessible via NFS. See my previous performance post
NetApp gateways are a lot more expensive then a comparable standard HP server running Solaris or any other major OS, e.g. Windows or Linux. I was curious if all that money paid for NetApp was actually worth it from a pure performance perspective. Did the NetApp performance really justify the price.
Previously Solaris posted the best NAS NFS gateway results. It would be the best operating system to compare to.I just so happen to have a NetApp with similar harware specs. Obviously its very difficult to compare a standard server from HP and the controllers from NetApp. Realizing that there are vast differences between the two is simply part of the test. You are paying for more with the NetApp.
However, one of the most important considerations in comparing an HP\Solaris solution with NetApp is making sure with use the same number of drives. Using different drive types, spindle speeds, and number of drives would skew the results. That is to say that the drive sub-system could easily make one system appear worse or better than it really was.
Luckily I got my hands on a NetApp system that almost exactly matched the Solaris\HP system in drive layout. They both had SAS 3gbps drives. They both had 15K drives. The drive counts for the vmdk storage, i.e. where the IO was going, were the same.Drive size was different with the Solaris\HP system using 72GB drives and NetApp using 600GB.
RAID configuration was different. The Solaris\HP solution had 2x RAID-1 drives from OS. NetApp has 3x RAID-DP for OS. The data volume for Solaris\HP was RAID-0 and NetApp was RAID-DP. This favors the Solaris\HP solution as RAID-0 is just a simple stripe with no read or write RAID penalty.
NetApp Specs
FAS3160
2x Controllers - 1 Active and 1 Passive
3x 600GB SAS 15K RAID-DP for OS\Root Volume
14x 72GB SAS 15K RAID-DP for Data Volume
8GB RAM per Controller
2GB NVRAM per Controller
Test Results
The NetApp performance numbers across the board were excellent beating the Solaris\HP solution by wide margins in all categores. For some categories, NetApp out performed the competition by almost 4x. It's up to the reader to decide if the performance benefit is worth the additional price. However, it is nice to now that all that additional money did buy a substantial increase in performance.
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