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Lab Validation Report NetApp EF560 Flash Arrays for SQL Server

Enterprise Storage for Performance-driven Databases

By Tony Palmer, Senior Lab Analyst

May 2015 © 2015 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Lab Validation: NetApp EF560 Flash Arrays for Microsoft SQL Server 2

© 2015 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Contents

Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 3 Background ............................................................................................................................................................... 3 NetApp EF-Series Flash Arrays .................................................................................................................................. 4 Database Considerations .......................................................................................................................................... 5

ESG Lab Validation ........................................................................................................................................ 6 Performance – IOPS and Bandwidth ........................................................................................................................ 6 Microsoft SQL Server Database Performance .......................................................................................................... 9 Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability (RAS) ..................................................................................................... 12

ESG Lab Validation Highlights ..................................................................................................................... 14

Issues to Consider ....................................................................................................................................... 14

The Bigger Truth ......................................................................................................................................... 15

Appendix ..................................................................................................................................................... 16

All trademark names are property of their respective companies. Information contained in this publication has been obtained by sources The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) considers to be reliable but is not warranted by ESG. This publication may contain opinions of ESG, which are subject to change from time to time. This publication is copyrighted by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. Any reproduction or redistribution of this publication, in whole or in part, whether in hard-copy format, electronically, or otherwise to persons not authorized to receive it, without the express consent of The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc., is in violation of U.S. copyright law and will be subject to an action for civil damages and, if applicable, criminal prosecution. Should you have any questions, please contact ESG Client Relations at 508.482.0188.

ESG Lab Reports

The goal of ESG Lab reports is to educate IT professionals about data center technology products for companies of all types and sizes. ESG Lab reports are not meant to replace the evaluation process that should be conducted before making purchasing decisions, but rather to provide insight into these emerging technologies. Our objective is to go over some of the more valuable feature/functions of products, show how they can be used to solve real customer problems and identify any areas needing improvement. ESG Lab's expert third-party perspective is based on our own hands-on testing as well as on interviews with customers who use these products in production environments. This ESG Lab report was sponsored by NetApp.



Introduction

This ESG Lab Report documents the real-world performance, reliability, availability, and serviceability of NetApp EF-Series flash arrays in Microsoft SQL Server database environments. A combination of hands on testing by ESG Lab and audited in-house performance testing executed by NetApp were used to create this report.

Background

IT managers, line-of-business stakeholders and senior executives continue to look for ways to improve resource utilization and ROI in IT. According to ESG research, 73% of large midmarket (500 to 999 employees) and enterprise (1,000 or more employees) organizations are consolidating databases to some extent, which is an indicator that these organizations are striving to increase efficiency.1 When asked about the challenges IT managers face with their database environments and supporting infrastructures, organizations indicated that managing data growth and database size and meeting database performance requirements were specific challenges (see Figure 1).2 In the context of databases, response time is a critical component of performance as it has a direct impact on the responsiveness of applications and the experience of users.

Figure 1. Database Environment and Supporting Infrastructure Challenges

Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, 2014.

When delving deeper to explore the challenges just within managing database size and growth, these same organizations cited performance degradation (42%), bottlenecks caused by data replication processes (36%), and the inability to complete maintenance tasks within service windows (27%) as specific difficulties.3 These responses indicate that performance as well as reliability, availability, and serviceability are all important features for current and future database environments and the supporting IT infrastructure.

1Source: ESG Research Report, Enterprise Database Trends in a Big Data World, July 2014. 2ibid. 3ibid.

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No challenges with current database environment

Lack of skilled staff

Patch, maintenance & version update processes

Supporting databases in virtualized environments

Provisioning storage

Provisioning servers

Deploying new database technology & applications

Meeting security/compliance requirements

Meeting database performance requirements

Supporting databases in cloud environments

Creating test/development environments

Managing data growth and database size

In general, which of the following challenges does your organization have with its current database environment and supporting infrastructure? (N=373)

http://www.netapp.com/

http://www.esg-global.com/research-reports/enterprise-database-trends-in-a-big-data-world/



NetApp EF-Series Flash Arrays

NetApp EF-Series all flash arrays are designed specifically for database-driven environments demanding maximum performance, reliability and availability. Scaling up to 192 TB of capacity, the EF-Series maximizes both transactional I/O and total throughput while minimizing response times, all in a high-availability configuration.

Figure 2. NetApp EF560 Flash Array

The NetApp EF560 supports 10Gb iSCSI, 16GFC, 12Gb SAS, and 56Gb InfiniBand for host connectivity and 12Gb SAS for expansion. The EF560 is designed to reduce data center footprint while supporting I/O-intensive database workloads, high-performance file systems, and throughput-intensive streaming applications while maintaining high availability.

NetApp EF-Series storage systems run NetApp SANtricity storage management software, which provides advanced storage functionality to ensure data availability, protection, and integrity along with extended data protection, including snapshots, remote replication, and disaster recovery.

The NetApp EF560 is built on the field-proven reliability of the NetApp SANtricity architecture, with more than 750,000 storage systems deployed worldwide. Key capabilities of the NetApp EF-Series include:

Advanced availability capabilities, including dual controllers, fully-redundant I/O paths with automated failover, comprehensive monitoring and diagnostics, synchronous and asynchronous remote replication.

Advanced recovery capabilities, including snapshots and volume copies. Extensive configuration flexibility designed to adapt to a wide range of workloads. Proactive SSD health monitoring tracks wear life and issues an alert when thresholds are reached. Dynamic Disk Pools (DDP) data protection technology, which is designed to simplify management, eliminate

hot spots, and increase system reliability. Full drive encryption with no performance penalty and built-in key management. Starting configuration of as few as 6 SSDs with online scalability up to 120 SSDs.

A growing set of application-aware management plug-ins provides tight integration with management tools from Microsoft, VMware, Oracle, and others. Plug-ins simplify the management of EF-Series storage with built-in provisioning, monitoring, event management, and advanced data recovery. Advanced storage functionality is provided in the form of thin provisioning, snapshot technology, VMware VAAI integration, and Dynamic Disk Pools.



Database Considerations

IT advances including cloud, virtualization, big data, collaboration, mobile, social media/business, sensor technologies, robotics, better CPU performance for the price, and embedded technologies have forever altered the applications that enterprises will implement going forward. Singularly, any of these technologies carries enough force to spawn a wave of IT disruption, but the fact that they are all advancing simultaneously is causing massive upheaval in both the supply and demand side of IT. This true revolution is certainly not limited to the functions, user experience, and reach of enterprise applications: It also reaches to the related development, deployment, and management of the infrastructures, databases, and middleware that underlie enterprise applications.

Despite all the upheaval, data remains the life blood that oxygenates the entire body of enterprise IT, and SQL Server databases capture, manage, and distribute data for organizations, including both online transaction processing (OLTP) and big data analytics applications.

Why This Matters

Response time is critical for OLTP databases because this is the delay that an application will experience (and pass on to users) when a storage system is stressed to its limits. Traditionally, the generally accepted threshold for online transactional applications has been 10ms. Today, given the rapid pace of innovation, the increasing performance of other devices in the network, and the requirement to deliver results faster, this level of response time is no longer acceptable. For performance-critical database environments the storage subsystem must be able to deliver the needed data in under 1ms—and lower is better. When applications spend several milliseconds waiting for data to be returned, this can have a direct impact on a businesses bottom line. The more that can be done to eliminate, or greatly reduce the application server’s CPU wait time, the more efficient the application will be and the faster it will deliver the needed results to the business. An example where ESG has seen this is with extremely high volume transactional databases. The read-heavy mix of small block, random IO and large block sequential writes make for a very difficult workload to service. For many of these applications the only solution is an all solid-state system, like the EF560. In addition to ultra-low latency and high performance, reliability, availability, and serviceability are critical because increasing numbers of these applications are business- or even mission-critical.



ESG Lab Validation

ESG Lab performed hands-on evaluation and testing of NetApp EF Flash Arrays at NetApp facilities, in Sunnyvale, California. Testing was designed to demonstrate the performance of NetApp EF Flash Array as storage for Microsoft SQL Server using industry standard tools and methodologies. Also of interest were reliability, availability, and serviceability.

Performance – IOPS and Bandwidth

ESG Lab started with a test bed configured as summarized in Figure 3. Two industry-standard x64 servers were connected via 16GFC to a NetApp EF560 storage system. The EF560 was populated with 24 800GB SSDs and contained 24GB cache. The storage fabric was provided by two Brocade 6505 FC switches. The servers were configured with 12 cores and 80GB of memory, and were running Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard and Microsoft SQL Server 2014.

Figure 3. The ESG Lab Test Bed

ESG Lab Testing

In a way, storage system benchmark testing is like an analysis of the performance of a car. Specifications including horsepower and acceleration from zero to 60 are a useful first-pass indicator of a car’s performance. While specifications provide a starting point, a variety of other factors should be taken into consideration, including the condition of the road, the skill of the driver, and gas mileage ratings. Much like buying a car, a test drive with real-world application traffic is the best way to determine how a storage system will perform in real-world conditions.

ESG Lab performance testing began with an evaluation of low level IOPS and throughput characterization tests of the EF-Series platform using the open source Diskspd4 storage testing utility. I/O per second, or IOPS, is a measure of the number of operations that a storage system can perform. When a system is able to deliver a large number of IOPS, it will tend to be able to service more applications and users in parallel. Throughput is an indicator of the available bandwidth and data-moving capabilities of a storage system. A workload consisting of 100% random 8KB reads and a target of 500 microseconds was used for this first pass analysis of the raw aggregate IOPS and corresponding response times of the NetApp EF-Series platform, as shown in Figure 4. The EF560 was tested using three different data protection configurations: RAID 10, RAID5, and Dynamic Data Pools (DDP).

4 https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/DiskSpd-a-robust-storage-6cd2f223

https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/DiskSpd-a-robust-storage-6cd2f223



Figure 4. NetApp EF560 IOPS Targeting 500µs Average Response Time

As seen here, the system was able to sustain more than 458,000 IOPS with a response time at the host of 560 microseconds (µs). In addition to demonstrating the raw IOPS performance of the EF560, this test also illustrates the performance differences between the various data protection schemes. The difference between the highest result and the lowest was 2.1%, with the difference in response times just 11.5 microseconds.

In previous testing, the system’s capacity for moving large amounts of data was demonstrated using a 1024KB sequential workload—reads and then writes—as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5. NetApp EF560 Throughput

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The EF560 delivered more than 12GB/sec of read throughput and nearly 8GB/sec of write throughput. The detailed results are presented in Table 1.

Table 1. NetApp EF560 IOPS and Throughput

NetApp EF560 Data Protection IOPS Response Time

(µs) Throughput

(GB/sec) IOPS RAID 10 457,698 560 N/A

IOPS RAID 5 458,015 560 N/A

IOPS DDP 448,543 572 N/A

Read Throughput RAID 5, RAID 6 N/A N/A 12.28

Write Throughput RAID 5, RAID 6 N/A N/A 7.97

What the Numbers Mean

IOPS is a measure of the storage system’s ability to process small, transactional operations. Throughput is a measure of the available bandwidth provided by the storage system.

ESG Lab’s testing did not attempt to determine the maximum IOPS that the storage system could sustain; the tests are designed to have poor locality of reference in order to stress the storage system.

ESG Lab confirmed that the EF560 was able to provide 458,015 small block random IOPS at 560 microseconds with just 24 SSDs, indicating a very efficient storage engine.

Achieving more than 458,000 IOPS with just 560 µs response time demonstrates the EF-Series’ suitability for the most demanding high-speed transactional database environments.

Throughput is excellent as well, with 12.28 GB/sec for large block sequential reads. 12.28 GB/sec represents the ability of an OLAP database to process more than 43 Terabytes of data in an

hour.

Why This Matters

A storage system needs a strong engine and well-designed architecture to perform predictably in a real-world, mixed workload environment. Two measures of the strength of a storage controller engine are IOPS and throughput. ESG Lab confirmed that a NetApp EF-Series storage system can sustain more than 458,000 8KB random read IOPS and an excellent 12.28 GB/sec of aggregate large block sequential read throughput.

In ESG Lab’s experience, these are impressive results for a dual controller modular storage system using SAS SSDs. These results suggest that the EF-Series is well suited for high-transaction and high-throughput business-critical database environments, as well as consolidated enterprise environments with highly virtualized servers running demanding mixed workload and high-bandwidth applications like analytics.



Microsoft SQL Server Database Performance

Raw measurements of maximum IOPS and throughput are basic indicators of a platform’s ability to perform, but these measurements are hard to directly translate into a more real-world experience. To provide a more appropriate test of the capability of the NetApp EF Flash Array, ESG Lab used the Diskspd utility to emulate the typical functions of transaction-oriented, real-world SQL Server databases. SQL Server applications are generally characterized by largely random I/O and generate both queries (reads) and updates (writes). This transactional operation workload was designed to measure the performance of the EF-Series in a life-like context, and as such did not stress the system to its limits.

ESG Lab Testing

SQL Server database I/O activity was simulated using the Diskspd utility, using an 8K block size with 80% reads and 20% writes. Testing was executed in multiple RAID configurations. Figure 6 depicts the results of a sequence of OLTP tests of increasing load on the system, with the EF560 storage configured in RAID 5.

Figure 6. NetApp EF560 Performance–8K Blocks 80/20 Read/Write I/O Mix

An extremely important component of the results, response time is critical as this is the delay that an application will experience and pass on to users. As an example, let’s look at a long-running batch process, like the extract, transform, load (ETL) step in populating data warehouses. In this example, the ETL requires 4,000,000 IO operations to complete.5 If the underlying storage is able to process one IO at a time and respond to each operation in 12 milliseconds—typical for a high performance, all-disk array—the entire process will take an aggregate of 48 million milliseconds or 13.3 hours to complete. If this workload is run on a system where the underlying storage is able to respond to each operation in 1.5 milliseconds—typical for an all-flash array—the process will take 6 million microseconds, or 1.7 hours. Running this job on the EF560, assuming an average response time of 600 microseconds, the process will take 2.4 million milliseconds which is just 40 minutes—one twentieth of the time of the all-disk array.

5 This example is for illustration purposes only, and does not take into account the complexities of real-world appllications and storage architectures like threading, queueing, caching, number of devices, etc. that would have an impact on actual run times.

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The EF560 has demonistrated the ability to deliver consistent performance as the storage workload was increased across all tests, achieving over 248,000 IOPS while maintaining average response times just over 500 µs in a RAID 10 configuration. In addition, as workload increased, the EF560 continued to deliver increasing performance while maintaining flat response times. These results demonstrate that the EF560 is capable of servicing very demanding transactional requirements of real-world SQL Server databases with consistent performance and response time, and can scale performance as the demands of the business grows. Table 2 shows performance across protection schemes at a response time closest to 500µs.

Table 2. NetApp EF560 IOPS and Latency for OLTP Transactional Workloads at 500 µs Response Time

Data Protection

Scheme

Total IOPS

80%R/20%W 8K block

Average Response Time (µs)

Throughput (MB/sec)

RAID 10 248,339 517 1,940.15

RAID 5 188,980 509 1,476.40

DDP 150,127 533 1,172.87

The EF-Series supports RAID 10, RAID 5, and NetApp DDP data protection schemes. Results of ESG testing using the same OLTP workload on both the previous generation EF-Series (EF550) and the EF560 are shown in Figure 7. The results compare the performance of each system at similar response time levels.

Figure 7. NetApp EF550 & EF560 SQL Server Performance

The previous generation EF550 achieved excellent performance, returning between 72,000 and 75,000 IOPS. At comparable response times, the EF560 more than doubled performance, with RAID 5 driving 2.5 times the IOPS performance, and RAID 10 returning 3.3 times the IOPS performance with a 35% lower response time. With NetApp EF-Series, storage administrators have the option to leverage the availability and convenience of DDP without compromising the performance of business-critical SQL Server database applications.

73,475 72,691 75,800

150,177

188,980

248,339

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Detailed results are shown in Table 3.

Table 3. NetApp EF550 & EF560 IOPS and Throughput with Different Data Protection Schemes

Data

Protection Scheme

IOPS

80%R/20%W 8K block

Average Response Time (µs)

Throughput (MB/sec)

EF550 EF560 EF550 EF560 EF550 EF560

RAID 10 75,800 248,339 415 517 1,073.66 1,940.15

RAID 5 72,691 188,980 495 509 1,050.57 1,476.40 NetApp DDP 73,475 150,177 790 792 1,046.08 1,173.26


These results indicate that the EF560 storage system more than doubled the performance of the previous generation EF550, with RAID 10 delivering 3.3 times the performance at similar response times.

The EF560 can easily support demanding SQL Server database environments—using any data protection scheme—supporting a demanding amount of transactions with consistent sub-800 microsecond response time, which translates to responsiveness to the user.

Why This Matters

According to ESG research, 42% of IT organizations indicated that performance degradation is one of the most important challenges they face with respect to managing database size and growth, making it the most popular response.6 Performance degradation occurs when the storage system controllers or disk drives cannot keep pace with the increased workloads imposed on the system by a growing database environment. Given the power of application servers today, there is significant time spent waiting for other parts of the environment, the quicker the storage layer can deliver the more efficient the IT datacenter will become.

ESG Lab confirmed that a NetApp EF-Series storage system can support a demanding SQL Server database workload, supporting 329,837 IOPS at sub-1000 microsecond response time, demonstrating that the EF-Series can easily keep pace with critical SQL Server database workloads and meet the requirements of growing businesses.

ESG Lab also confirmed that NetApp EF-Series storage systems maintain comparable performance using RAID 10, RAID 5, and NetApp DDP data protection schemes while maintaining response times below 800 microseconds. These results more than doubled that of the previous generation EF-Series and show that IT administrators can leverage the flexibility of the EF-Series storage systems in very demanding SQL Server database environments.

6 Source: ESG Research Report, Enterprise Database Trends in a Big Data World, July 2014.




Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability (RAS)

NetApp has included a long list of advanced reliability, availability, and serviceability features in the NetApp EF flash arrays, providing systems to support the ever-increasing pace of business. Several of the features and benefits built into the EF-Series are:

Automated Support (ASUP)–Automatic sending of diagnostic system data to NetApp, automated case creation and part dispatch, designed to provide proactive and preemptive customer support.

Dynamic Disk Pools (DDP)–A data protection scheme designed to provide reduced re-build times and ensure both performance and availability under failure conditions.

T10-Protection Information (T10-PI)–Provides controller-to-drive data integrity protection to ensure I/O completion without bad blocks written to or read from disk. T10-PI protects against displacement errors, data corruption due to hardware or software errors, bit flips, and silent drive errors.

Asymmetric Logical Unit Access (ALUA)–A standards-based method of allowing server I/O to traverse multiple paths to a volume, eliminating controller ownership change thrashing in clustered and multi-host configurations and enabling automatic ownership optimization.

Dynamic Storage Functionality–Volume Expansion (DVE), Capacity Addition (DCA), RAID Migration (DRM), and Segment Size (DSS) can all be executed and adjusted dynamically and online, keeping data available through reconfigurations.

Non-disruptive Upgrades–Ensures system availability during upgrades of controller firmware, Embedded System Module (ESM)/Input-Output Multiplexer (IOM) firmware, and drive firmware.

Event Logging and Alerts–Provide chronological event logging and user alerting for configuration changes, degraded operational status, hardware component failures, background data scans, and failure debug information.

ESG Lab Testing

In addition to the many reliability, availability, and serviceability features of the EF-Series storage systems, NetApp also tracks the in-service reliability of all field-deployed EF-Series platforms. ESG Lab reviewed the EF-Series reliability data, which shows that the EF-Series achieved an outstanding 99.99991% (“six-nines”) availability. Detailed data is provided in Table 4.

Table 4. NetApp EF-Series Reliability Data

NetApp EF-Series Field Population > 500 units

Operational Lifetime 2,368,800 hours (~1.2 years / 14 months)

Storage Availability 99.99991%


99.99991% availability is referred to as “six-nines.” Six-nines availability is equivalent to 31.5 seconds of downtime per year, 2.59 seconds of downtime per

month, or 0.605 seconds of downtime per week. Demonstrating six-nines availability means that EF-storage systems can be virtually always available to the

user.



Why This Matters

As storage environments grow in size and complexity, so too does the impact of data outages. ESG asked organizations how much downtime they could tolerate for their tier-1 data. More than half (53%) of respondents indicated that access to their tier-1 data could not be interrupted for more than one hour without causing adverse business impact. Even more telling is the fact that nearly one-fifth (17%) of organizations stated that any downtime was unacceptable for their tier-1 data.7 Since lack of application availability can result in missed business opportunities, reduced productivity, lost revenue, dissatisfied customers, damage to the company’s reputation, and even legal liability, it follows that maintaining uptime and data access are crucial for business productivity.

Global operations demand 24x7 data access, leaving no window for planned or unplanned downtime. Server and storage consolidation magnify the need for high availability and reliability because a hardware outage will affect many systems and applications, not just one.

ESG Lab confirmed that EF-series arrays achieved an outstanding record of “six-nines” (99.99991%) uptime—the equivalent of no more than 31.5 seconds of downtime per year. This impressive record demonstrates the EF-Series’ suitability as storage for the most demanding business- and mission-critical database environments.

7 Source: ESG Research Report, Trends in Data Protection Modernization, August 2012.

http://www.esg-global.com/research-reports/trends-in-data-protection-modernization/



ESG Lab Validation Highlights

The same NetApp EF560 system was able to deliver more than 458,000 small block random IOPS with 560 microsecond response times using 24 800GB SSDs.

ESG Lab confirmed that a NetApp EF560 storage system was able to sustain an excellent 12.28 GB/sec of large block read throughput, and nearly 8 GB/sec of large block write throughput.

The NetApp EF560 delivered consistently high IOPS and low response times as SQL Server database workloads were added, demonstrating efficient utilization of back-end storage to satisfy application demands.

The NetApp EF560 was able to maintain 517 microsecond response times at more than 248,000 IOPS with both read-heavy and write-heavy SQL Server database workloads.

ESG Lab confirmed that SQL Server database workloads on NetApp Dynamic Disk Pools were able to sustain excellent performance at consistently low response times, demonstrating the EF-Series’ applicability to high-workload environments where data protection and flexibility are prime concerns.

The NetApp EF-Series arrays demonstrated a solid “six-nines” availability (99.99991%) record in the field, with less than 31.5 seconds of downtime per year.

Issues to Consider

Generally accepted best practices and predominantly default SQL Server and NetApp EF-Series settings were used during the design of this test. As expected after any benchmark of this magnitude, deep analysis of the results indicates that tuning would probably yield slightly higher absolute results. Given that the goal of this test was not to generate the largest numbers possible, ESG Lab is confident that the results presented in this report meet the objective of estimating consistency of performance and responsiveness in a variety of SQL Server database environments and scenarios sharing a consolidated pool of NetApp EF-Series storage.

The test results/data presented in this document are based on benchmarks deployed in a controlled environment. Due to the many variables in each production data center environment, it is still important to perform capacity planning and testing in your own environment to validate a storage system configuration.

NetApp field reliability data is based on a population with a historical lifetime of less than two years. As all-flash arrays are relatively new technology with limited industry history, long-term reliability may shift as more time in the field is accumulated.



The Bigger Truth

With the advent of business intelligence and big data applications as well as traditional OLTP applications, database environments are becoming more important to a growing number of organizations. According to ESG research, database activities such as data growth management, major application deployments and upgrades, business intelligence/data analytics initiatives, and data center consolidation all rank high among the most-cited IT priorities reported by respondents this year.8 Ninety-six percent of research respondents report that they are on the path to database consolidation, with 45% reporting that they are actively investing in database consolidation efforts.9

As IT organizations pursue these priorities, they face significant challenges. ESG research indicates that managing data growth and database size as well as meeting database performance requirements ranked high in the top-ten reported challenges related to organizations’ database environments and supporting infrastructure.10

The NetApp EF-Series all-flash storage arrays, with up to 192TB of high-bandwidth low-latency storage capacity and a flexible mix of 10Gb iSCSI, 12Gb SAS, 16GFC, and 56Gb InfiniBand host connectivity options, is ideally suited for database infrastructure, consolidation, and virtualization in medium-sized businesses, mid-range enterprise environments, and remote sites.

ESG Lab confirmed that the performance and scalability of the NetApp EF-Series is well suited for high-performance database environments supporting business-critical applications. A high availability pair of NetApp EF560 arrays was able to meet the demands of a real-world SQL Server database application, achieving more than 248,000 8KB, 80% read OLTP IOPS with 517 µs average response times.

The NetApp EF560 was able to deliver 12.28 GB/sec of streaming read throughput and 7.97 GB/sec of streaming write throughput as well. These results demonstrate the suitability of the EF-Series platform for demanding SQL Server database environments with a wide variety of business-critical workloads.

The NetApp EF-Series builds on the field-proven reliability of the NetApp E-Series architecture, with more than 750,000 storage systems deployed worldwide. With more than a year of in-service history, EF-Series arrays have delivered 99.99991% uptime (“six-nines”)—the equivalent of less than 31.5 seconds of downtime per year. NetApp has also extended the SANtricity storage management software to specifically support the EF-Series. SANtricity provides advanced storage functionality for reliability, serviceability, and availability, including dynamic drive rebalancing, RAID and Dynamic Disk Pools (DDP) management, cache tiering, and extended data protection, including snapshots, remote replication, and disaster recovery.

ESG Lab is pleased to report that the NetApp EF-Series delivers simple, efficient, consistently high performance, along with advanced functionality—thin provisioning, enhanced snapshots, and Dynamic Disk Pools. NetApp EF-Series is clearly well suited to support a mix of demanding real-world business applications running in a performance-critical SQL Server database infrastructure. Organizations considering or planning SQL Server database consolidation would be smart to take a closer look at the NetApp EF-Series.

8 Source: ESG Research Report, 2015 IT Spending Intentions Survey, February 2015. 9 Source: ESG Research Report, Enterprise Database Trends in a Big Data World, July 2014. 10 Source: Ibid.

http://www.esg-global.com/research-reports/2015-it-spending-intentions-survey/




Appendix

Table 5. Test Bed Overview

Storage

NetApp EF560 24 800GB SSD 16G FC host connect

Servers

One Dell PowerEdge R720 Two 6-core processors 80GB RAM Two QLogic 2562 dual-port 16GFC HBA Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard SQL Server 2014

SAN Fabric

Two Brocade 6505 24-port 16GFC Switch

20 Asylum Street | Milford, MA 01757 | Tel: 508.482.0188 Fax: 508.482.0218 | www.esg-global.com

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