THE ALL FLASH FAS V/S PURE STORAGE

SHRIDHAR SHRIRAGHAVAN

EVOLUTION OF ALL FLASH MARKET LANDSCAPE

INFLUENTIAL TRENDS Flash brings high performance to data services

Storage efficiency technologies

The newer application workloads are driven by mobile computing, social media, big data/analytics and cloud computing

These associated higher workloads require storage performance (IOPS, latency, throughput, consistency) that HDDs alone cannot cost effectively meet

Data is expected to grow at 44% CAGR, so the ‘managing growth’ problem will not let up soon. Flash is needed to maintain balance as infrastructure density increases.

ECONOMICS SSD Prices per GB have steadily

fallen since 2013, from about $2 to 69 cents while HDD’s remain constant

FLASH AT SCALE

Flash at scale delivers significant secondary economic benefits Fewer devices, reduced energy/floor space

consumption, fewer servers, lower s/w licensing costs

AFA MARKET – REVENUE & FORECAST Worldwide AFA segment reached $1.3 billion in 2014 Market expected to grow 5 times in revenue by 2019 AFAs will dominate primary storage by 2018-2019 AFA Vendors pursuing lower entry price points

Shorten sales cycles, newer customersREVENUE ($M) SHARE (%)

EMC 112.3 22.6Pure Storage 90.9 18.3IBM 82.9 16.7NetApp 45 9.1SolidFire 35.6 7.2Nimbus Data 34.3 6.9Other 95.3 19.2Total 496.3 100

FUTURE OUTLOOK Mixed workload consolidation is the

competitive background for AFAs for 2015 and beyond

Independent software vendors (ISV) will develop primary storage applications assuming all flash configurations

VM-level storage management will become a way of life by 2017

VENDOR COMPARISON

FOREWORD The two products under comparison come from

firms whose competency and outlook in the AFA market is different

Pure Storage’s competency lies in software (storage efficiency) and reducing effective cost

NetApp’s competency is hardware, performance and enterprise class data services

Ultimately, it is the application workload that governs which solutions you should consider

TARGET MARKETS The Pure Storage FA-405, FA-420 and FA-

450 are designed to address the small business and remote offices, mid-market and high-end enterprise markets respectively

Netapp All Flash FAS is targeted for enterprise customers who want an all-flash system for performance while maintaining their familiar storage management and data protection features

PRODUCT ARCHITECTURENETAPP PURE STORAGEScale out approach - Is a cluster of servers (nodes) with a single point of management

Scale up approach – One stand alone server deployed. (Moore’s law allows for replacement of the stand alone server in the tech. refresh cycle. *How long now?)

COMMON GOALS OF EACH APPROACHScale performance, capacity or both non-disruptively and without performance degradation.Others include affordability, interoperability and operational simplicityRegarded as the storage of the future

Mission critical workloads can run on 2 or more servers to preserve availabilitySuitable when a large number of smaller nodes are needed, perhaps for a web server farm or a server cluster where physically redundant hosts are required

Suitable for major virtual server consolidation

Works only if resources to a virtual machine are carefully allocated

Potential for scale-up server failures and work disruptions is real

*“I pick 2020 as the earliest date we could call [Moore's law] dead”, Bob Colwell (Intel)

PERFORMANCE Performance is one of the most important metrics for

embracing All Flash Storage.

Impacts your business by increasing efficiency and reducing server and licensing costs by 50%

Key factors are

IOPS (Higher the better)

Latency/Response time (Lower the better, <1ms)

Consistency

NETAPP WINS IN PERFORMANCENETAPP (STRENGTH) PURE STORAGE (WEAKNESS)Scale out performance Use commodity SLC flash drives as

“NVRAM” to journal data, so maximum theoretical write performance of only 150,000 4K IOPS*

685,281 IOPS, $2.68 IOPS and 1.23 millisecond response time at 100% load (Variability in latency is low too)

The 512B granularity approach shall lead to fragmentation over time.And since in flash, sequential IO is faster than random, when the system would have to hop around (random read) to read in 512B blocks, performance dips

NetApp’s Data ONTAP FlashEssentials innovations increase flash performance and efficiency

500,000 overall IOPS sustained (@ 4KB)200,000 write IOPS sustained (@ 4KB)*

Pure Storage’s ACTIVE/ACTIVE Controller Message (P.S. – Similar to ACTIVE/PASSIVE)Understand your requirements to determine if you need high performance or consistent performanceOnly 50% of resources are used here – so as to have minimum impact in downtime.

STORAGE EFFICIENCY Second most important metric enabling more data to be

stored in less space

Storage efficiency significantly reduces your cost of ownership and effective cost

Areas of study include Deduplication (Inline and cluster wide is desirable)

Compression (Inline is desirable)

In-line data reduction

Thin provisioning

PURE STORAGE WINS Pure Storage is the leader in storage efficiency with

it’s differentiator being deduplication and compression

NETAPP’S WEAKNESS The new AFF offers partial inline deduplication

with actual byte-to-byte comparison being post process

NetApp’s deduplication is volume based only Data ONTAP lacks global deduplication across

LUNs which means that 250 LUNs can have 250 copies of same data adding up to a high cost flash array

CAPACITY (NETAPP WINS) NetApp’s AFF offers upto 384 TB in raw

capacity and 1565.3 in effective capacity (Single HA Pair)

NAS Scale out (12 HA Pair) can offer 4.6 PB

SAN Scale out (4 HA Pair) can offer 1.5 PB

Pure Storage’s //m Series offers only upto 136 TB in raw capacity and 400 TB in effective capacity but with high storage efficiency

APPLICATION PERFORMANCE + DATA SERVICES

While Pure Storage supports enterprise applications like VDI, Oracle etc., superior VDI application performance is achieved on NetApp.

For databases however, Pure Storage wins

Data services like Replication, Encryption etc. are refined at NetApp

APPLICATION PERFORMANCE + DATA SERVICESNETAPP PURE

STORAGELEADS

Converged Infrastructure

AllFlash FlexPod available for VDI environmentsHybrid Array FlexPod available too

Flash Stack CI announced Dec 2014

NETAPP

ORACLE & Microsoft SQL

Supported Supported - It requires 5-10x less flash than hyper converged approach

PURE STORAGE

VMWare (VDI) & Citrix

Supported - Storage costs as low as $55/ desktop with Horizon View

Supported - Markets only against disks

NETAPP

Openstack Deeply Integrated Recently added (2014)

NETAPP

Data ServicesSnapshots, encryption, replication, Integration

Supported (MATURE)

Supported and free in Purity 4.0(FlashProtect & FlashRecover (Launched 2014))

NETAPP

FLEXIBILITY AND SCALABILITY(NETAPP WINS) How confident are you about your future data architectures?

Flexibility - NetApp’s FAS allows for a lot of flexibility by allowing data to be moved from flash to disk to cloud.

NetApp offers both SAN & NAS architectures, while Pure Storage offers SAN only

Scalability - A Pure system uses a whopping 384 GB of RAM to deliver 120 TB

Given that DRAM prices are dropping at a much slower pace than flash, Pure is hitting the limits of commodity server design

QUALITY OF SERVICE (NETAPP WINS) Built-in QoS lets you set performance

limits on files, volumes, LUNs, or an entire storage virtual machine (SVM) to give priority to your most important workloads.

RELIABILITY (STALEMATE) Both companies boast >99.999% reliability across all systems deployed Pure Storage - Proprietary RAID 3D is deployed NetApp – RAID 6 or RAID 4 or combination of prior with RAID 1 is

deployed

PURE STORAGE – STRENGTHS (INHERENT & TRANSIENT)

Cost efficient performance driven by deduplication and compression driving down effective cost

Creative pricing and guarantee programs around controller upgrades, SSD warranties and maintenance pricing

Customer trust by demonstrating it is reliable, stable and easy to work with

Delivers capable data management services and proven data reduction implementation while based on consumer-grade SSD technology

Accelerate the I/O performance for relational databases, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and virtual server infrastructure and clouds.

Others (TRANSIENT) – Gartner Magic Quadrant Leadership status

PURE STORAGE - WEAKNESSES Performance

Lack of enterprise class data management and application features, NetApp standard

Pure Storage’s FA-400 series product has limited scalability (read high RAM/Storage ratio) when compared to competitive products.

NETAPP - STRENGTHS Robust performance

Leading data management services and ecosystem

Scalable – All flash systems will run out of capacity before performance levels decrease

All-Flash FAS is available as part of the FlexPod reference architecture

Alliances (Cisco, VMWare etc.)

NETAPP - WEAKNESSES Lack of data reduction capabilities limits

the appeal of FAS Series in server virtualization, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and online transaction processing (OLTP) consolidation use cases.

Creative Marketing capabilities vis-à-vis Pure Storage

PROMOTION (TRANSIENT – Info only) Pure Storage introduced the ForeverFlash

initiative, which combines the ability to non-disruptively scale performance or capacity with a maintenance program that promises no hikes in annual fees.

When users extend support for another period, Pure provides new controllers at no cost. 

Caveat Pure must continue to excel at R&D and deliver

upgrades from engineering With majority of sales from channel, how would the

finances work out?

PRICING & STANDARD WARRANTY – (STALEMATE - PRICE/SERVICE WARS) FACT - Flash performance is so good that customers want to stay on one platform for as

long as possible PURE STORAGE Flash Array 405 & 450

List prices range from sub-$100K to multi-$100K. Pure's raw flash is the most expensive at $12.03/GB Standard warranty is 3 years from initial purchase.

Maintenance and support are offered in 1, 3 and 5 year plans, each with 4-hour or next business day (NBD) options (both options are 24x7).  

Pricing for support is based on percentage of list price:   1 year 4-hour is 8%, NBD is 6% 3 year 4-hour is 20%, NBD is 15% 5 year 4-hour is 33%, NBD is 26%

NETAPP Starting street price is $25,000 AFF8000 is now priced at the same $5 per raw GB Support flat maintenance for up to seven years versus the typical three to five years, so

there's no penalty for staying on the platform for longer times

GAPS IN NETAPP’S OFFERING Storage efficiency is an industry

requirement and NetApp is lagging.

NetApp lacks ease of use for the SME target market. Pure Storage achieves this well.

Training and professional services are required for most of NetApp’s deployments

RECOMMENDATIONS LONG TERM

Product Enhancements

SHORT TERM – SAY “Capacity is free, performance costs” Focus on the medium & high-end enterprises targeted by Pure

Storage’s FA-450 only. They are more inclined to need performance, data services, application integration etc.

Leverage and build a compelling case for scalability, performance and data management services (NetApp’s strengths) during the pitch

Storage is a long term investment, caution the customer to not rush into the decision based on cost (Pure Storage’s strength)

“Moore’s law will be dead in a decade”, Bob Colwell (Intel), marking an end to scale up architecture (Pure Storage)

Discuss NetApp’s whole range of offerings

RECOMMENDATIONS Partner with ISW’s/Alliances to offer discounts on licenses

Attack Pure Storage’s hardware/weakness & marketing (Consumer grade SSDs, Performance, 50% CPU utilization etc.)

Tackle the prospect’s H/W and S/W needs separately (Review and refine product offerings, Unbundle premium offerings)

Focus on customer priority - $/GB or $/IOPS ?

THANK YOU