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Blog Entry
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EMC v NetApp comparison
Oct 22 2008 2:27PM
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I recently had the pleasure to visit both the EMC visitor facility in Boston, MA, followed a few weeks later by the NetApp headquarters in Research Triangle, North Carolina.
We are currently use NetApp devices for NAS and SAN and recently upgraded to a 3070C which is towards the upper end of NetApp’s offerings. As we are a medium sized company that is rapidly increasing in size we somehow appeared on the radar to EMC who decided it was time they courted us at their headquarters while they set about convincing us that we needed to switch to their storage solutions.
EMC are undoubtedly the market leader in storage but until fairly recently, their products seemed aimed squarely at the high-end market. Their Symmetrix line is legendary for its unmatched performance and stability however as an IT department with a tight budget we are certainly not in the market for a Symmetrix.
Therefore the whole premise of our EMC meeting was to sell us on using their Clarion series which is in essence their second tier solution.
The tour of the EMC facility is nothing short of awe inspiring and it drives home the fact that you can have full confidence that you will be supported by a mature, market leader in the storage sphere. One thing that we did expect before attending the meeting was a certain element of NetApp-bashing and the EMC “old school” did not disappoint. We were subjected to a number of technicians who explained in great detail why the NetApp WAFL(Write Anywhere File Layout) file system was inferior to the EMC storage OS.
EMC are also offering an interesting product in their Rainfinity line which allows seldom accessed files to be more off your primary storage onto lower cost infrastructure. This has the added benefit of significantly reducing the size of daily backups.
As EMC now owns VMWare, there was also a significant amount of discussion on this subject as we have a significant VMWare presence. Despite all the discussions, we were not given any information to lead us to believe that VMWare runs best on EMC hardware as opposed to any other vendor. However, since visiting the EMC location, there has been a significant change in the Management structure of VMWare where the original CEO Diane Greene was replaced by the EMC executive Paul Maritz. Perhaps this is an indicator that EMC and VMWare are going to be more closely integrated in the near future.
The visit to the NetApp facility was somewhat different that the EMC visit. NetApp has a small, new company feel and you can almost sense the innovation in the air. The NetApp presenters spent less time attacking the opposition and more time selling us on their unique offerings and value for money. In fact a number of their technical staff pointed out that they didn’t offer any solutions that would challenge the performance of an EMC Symmetrix. All of the NetApp models offer multiprotocol (SAN, NAS, iSCSI) support out of the box and particularly interesting were the snap tools that enable extremely fast backups and restores for both Exchange and VMware. These tools also extend to offer Disaster Recovery solutions. The tour of the facility was no less impressive than the EMC facility and in some ways even more so. The datacenter used some very forward thinking approaches to cooling by pressurizing an air tight space at the front of the racks with cool air and then collecting the hot air behind the racks.
In conclusion, in an ideal world where money was no concern then everyone would buy an EMC Symmetrix. The term I’ve heard a number of times is that “nobody ever lost their job by buying an EMC.” However if you have a budget under $200,000 then NetApp are the ideal choice for the small to medium sized business from a cost and innovation standpoint. If you were to carry out an apples to apples comparison of a NetApp 3070 to an EMC Clarion then I feel that the NetApp is offering far greater return on investment.
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