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?
