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White Paper

HP 3PAR StoreServ 7200 with File

Controller versus NetApp FAS3250

Storage System

Usable Capacity Analysis and

Comparison

Printed in the United States of America

Copyright 2015 Edison Group, Inc. New York.

Edison Group offers no warranty either expressed or implied on the information contained

herein and shall be held harmless for errors resulting from its use.

This report was developed by Edison Group, Inc. with HP assistance and funding. This report

may utilize information, including publicly available data, provided by various companies and

sources, including HP. The opinions are those of Edison Group, Inc. and do not necessarily

represent HP’s position. All products are trademarks of their respective owners.

First Publication: January 2015

Produced by: Chris Evans; Senior Analyst; Kalicharan Rakam, Analyst; Manny Frishberg, Editor;

Barry Cohen, Editor-in-Chief

Table of Contents

Executive Summary ..................................................................................................................... 1

Lab Configuration and Evaluation Methodology.................................................................. 3

Test Process ................................................................................................................................ 3

Test Results ................................................................................................................................... 4

Capacity at Initialization .......................................................................................................... 4

Share Provisioning Efficiency.................................................................................................. 6

Deduplication and Compression Efficiency .......................................................................... 6

Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................... 8

Appendix ..................................................................................................................................... 10

SUT Configurations ................................................................................................................ 10

System Capacity Metrics ........................................................................................................ 12

Datasets .................................................................................................................................... 13

Reference Screen Shots ........................................................................................................... 20

Storage Provisioning Reserve ............................................................................................ 23

Endnotes ...................................................................................................................................... 27

Edison: HP 3PAR 7200 versus NetApp FAS 3250: Usable Capacity Analysis Page 1

Executive Summary

The continuing massive growth in requirements for data storage capacity is a given for

almost any organization today. Growth is seen predominantly in what is known as

unstructured data, information that is typically text heavy and often stored as discrete

files rather than in a database or other controlling program. Unstructured data can

include e-books, documents, health records, audio, video, images, e-mail messages and

more. IDC expects a 50-fold increase in these data from 2010 to 20201.

The exponential rate of growth seen in unstructured data means that throwing more

storage capacity at the problem is not a tenable solution. Instead, storage vendors have

been working on ways to reduce costs and optimize the amount of data physically

stored on both disk and solid-state drives. As a result, we have seen features such as thin

provisioning, data deduplication and compression being introduced into primary

storage systems. These data reduction techniques provide varying levels of efficiency,

both at initialization, and when systems have been loaded with data, which is highly

dependent on system architecture.

Data duplication identifies chunks of repeated data across entire storage systems,

reducing the replicas to a single copy retained on disk. Compression is a technique that

identifies and optimizes repeated patterns of information, for example within a single

file. Data deduplication and compression are features offered by both HP 3PAR

StoreServ with File Controller and NetApp FAS storage systems.

Edison performed an analysis of the benefits of data reduction technologies between the

HP 3PAR StoreServ 7200 with File Controller and NetApp FAS3250 systems. The data

used was a typical representation of unstructured data found within most organizations

and was derived from Edison’s own file servers. Testing was performed to show the

savings on deployed capacity both before and after data was written to the system. This

shows the relative advantage of the HP 3PAR platform before data as even been written

to the array.

The results showed that system overhead on HP 3PAR StoreServ systems was only

3.09% compared to 10.93% on NetApp FAS. Furthermore when comparing the usable

capacity of 100TiB of storage, HP 3PAR StoreServ provided 8.8% more capacity than the

NetApp platform. Once the system was loaded with test data, the HP 3PAR StoreServ

system with File Controller reduced the allocated capacity by 24% compared to a

NetApp FAS total of 17% (6% dedupe, 11% compression).

Given 100TiB of raw storage, the HP 3PAR StoreServ solution would provide 64.61TiB of

usable capacity after system overhead and RAID-6(4+2). In comparison, the NetApp


FAS system provides only 59.38TiB after overheads and RAID-6 (3+2). When applying

the potential dedupe savings as observed in this analysis, the HP 3PAR StoreServ

system would be capable of storing 90.01TiB of usable capacity due to the reduction in

duplicated data. In comparison, the NetApp FAS system was less efficient, resulting in

an effective usable capacity of only 71.65TiB.

The figures are represented in Figure 1 and Table 2 below and have been adjusted to

ensure the RAID overhead is comparable between both systems.

Figure 1 – HP/NetApp Savings Comparison, 100TiB

Table 1 - HP/NetApp Savings Comparison 100TiB

In conclusion, we see that the HP 3PAR StoreServ 7200 with File Controller is both more

efficient at initial allocation and once data is loaded onto the system compared to the

equivalent technology from NetApp, making it the clear choice from an efficiency

perspective.

Metric

Adjusted RAID-6 Values

HP 3PAR StoreServ NetApp FAS

Physical (TiB) 100.00 100.00

System Overhead (TiB) 96.91 89.07

RAID-6 64.61 59.38

Usable after Dedupe 90.01 71.65


Lab Configuration and Evaluation Methodology

To perform the testing for this report, Edison installed two systems into the company’s

New York City Lab. HP provided HP 3PAR StoreServ 7200 Storage with 3PAR StoreServ

File Controller and Edison rented a NetApp FAS3250 Storage System.

Both systems were configured with SMB (Server Message Block) / CIFS (Common

Internet File System) shares and mapped to an HP ProLiant staging server that held the

test data on local storage. The dataset file sizes, drive capacity and utilization levels were

obtained from the respective management user interfaces, normalized to binary for

precision and consistency. See “System Capacity Metrics” on page 12 for more

information.

The dataset used for the efficiency comparison was comprised of actual Edison

documents copied to the staging server. See “Datasets” on page 13 for details.

Test Process

The test process was performed over a number of steps.

Measure System Capacity/Efficiency at Initialization. The available capacity of 1.

both systems was measured prior to any data being copied into the SMB shares.

Copy Data to the Test Systems. Data stored locally on the ProLiant management 2.

server was copied to the SMB shares.

Measure. The utilization of each system and respective savings were measured 3.

both from the array management user interfaces, and from the host file system

view, as reported by Windows Server 2012 installed on the ProLiant

management server.


Test Results

The data presented below has been taken from the management user interfaces of the

two storage systems in the test comparison. As the platforms use different metrics to

display capacity, the data has been normalized to the binary format utilized by the HP

3PAR StoreServ system (see “System Capacity Metrics” on page 12 for details).

Capacity at Initialization

Table 2 compares the reported and calculated capacities for each of the 2TB drives

installed into the two systems under test (SUT) after system initialization and before

hosts/clients were attached or shares created. HP 3PAR StoreServ systems show just

over 3% overhead, whereas the equivalent figure on NetApp FAS was almost 11%. The

NetApp value derives from a combination of the SATA drive block formatting overhead

for error correction and the rounding used by NetApp to ensure all drives report the

same capacity for similar drive models.

Metric HP 3PAR

StoreServ & File

Controller

NetApp FAS HP 3PAR

Advantage

Reported Disk Capacity 1,805GiB 1.62TiB

(1,659GiB)

146GiB (8.8%)

Normalized Capacity

(MiB)

1,848,320 1,698,816 149,504GiB (8.8%)

Standard 2TB Drive

Capacity (MiB)

1,907,349 1,907,349 N/A

System Overhead (MiB) 59,029 208,533 28.3% of NetApp

overhead

System Overhead (%) 3.09% 10.93% N/A

Table 2 - Physical Presented Drive Capacities

Table 3 shows the figures on disk capacities extrapolated up to cover the 24 drives

inserted into a standard disk shelf.


Metric (Figures in MiB unless

Specified)

HP 3PAR StoreServ

with File Controller

NetApp FAS

24 Drive Shelf Capacity (MiB) 44,359,680 40,771,584

System Overhead at Provisioning

(MiB)2 0% 5%

Capacity After System Overhead

(MiB) 44,359,680 38,733,001

3PAR Capacity Advantage (MiB) 5,626,679

3PAR Advantage as Drive Count

(Difference/Normalized Capacity)

3.06

Table 3 - Savings per 24-drive Disk Shelf

At initialization, NetApp systems reserve 5% of capacity for Snapshot Reserve, although

the customer may amend this figure. Over a standard 24-drive shelf, the relative saving

of HP 3PAR StorServ translates to approximately three 2TB drives. Alternatively,

expressing these figures on the basis of a 100TiB allocation of storage we see overheads

as detailed in Table 4. Customers can expect to receive almost 8TiB of extra capacity per

100TiB of storage over the equivalent NetApp FAS array when using HP 3PAR

StoreServ systems. Alternatively, expressing this in terms of the requirement to provide

100TiB of usable capacity, NetApp FAS systems require an additional 9.1TiB of physical

disk capacity to be installed.

Metric HP 3PAR StoreServ

with File Controller

NetApp FAS

Usable Capacity 96.91TiB 89.07TiB

3PAR Savings Advantage 7.84TiB

Required Capacity for 100TiB 103.2TiB 112.3TiB

NetApp uplift required for 100TiB

of usable capacity

9.1TiB

Table 4 – Savings per 100TiB of Storage


Share Provisioning Efficiency

Testing was performed on 100GB (93GiB) SMB shares provisioned through the

management interface of each system.

As discussed, NetApp’s Data ONTAP file layout (known as WAFL) requires a 5%

reserve for snapshots, further reducing the space available per share by that amount.

Neither the user interface on the storage system nor the client mounting the share shows

this overhead directly; it can only be viewed when managing snapshots —usually when

the reserve has been consumed — and snapshots need to be removed to allow the

feature to continue functioning. The 3PAR StoreServ array requires no reservation space

for snapshots.

Deduplication and Compression Efficiency

Table 5 presents the data from deduplication and compression of the unstructured data

set. The raw data capacity was 10.8GiB, with NetApp reporting a reduction of 2GB

(normalized to 1.86GiB) for a saving of 17%. The HP 3PAR StorServ system with the File

Controller reported a reduction of 3.06 GiB for a saving of 24% (based on sub-file level

deduplication performed by the File Controller), showing greater savings than NetApp

FAS. In this direct comparison, HP 3PAR StoreServ with File Controller is more than

64% more efficient in optimizing unstructured data than NetApp FAS.

Metric HP 3PAR StoreServ 7200

File Controller

NetApp FAS3250

Space Saving (GiB) 3.0600 1.86265

Space Used (GiB) 7.7527 8.95005

Space Efficiency – UI Figures (%) 24% 17% from 6%

(dedupe) and 11%

(compression)

Relative Advantage (%) 64.3%1

Table 5 - Data Reduction Efficiency Comparison 10.8GiB Data

The screen shots in Figure 2 and Figure 3 on page 7 show the deduplication results as

reported on the two systems. HP 3PAR StoreServ performs compression as part of the

same process. Compression is a manual, post-write process on the NetApp FAS system3.

1 Calculated as the percentage improvement of physical space saved by HP 3PAR StoreServ over NetApp FAS


This post-process compression consumes processor cycles, often affecting system

performance, when large numbers of files need to be compressed or rehydrated when

files need to be read.

Figure 2: Deduplication Results for HP 3PAR

Figure 3: Deduplication Results for NetApp FAS


Conclusion

The growing amount of unstructured data is one of the fastest consumers of enterprise

storage capacity. Storing this data is a major cost factor for most organizations, and

managing these costs is critical in enabling IT groups to achieve business goals within

tight budget restraints.

Hardware vendors have incorporated several approaches to accommodating the conflict

between storage growth and customer needs to control capital expenditures. Among

these approaches are thin provisioning, compression and deduplication.

Thin provisioning, as the name implies, allows a storage administrator to define storage

space capacity for a server without actually setting aside that space until actually

needed.

Deduplication reduces capacity requirements by applying algorithms that eliminate the

need to physically store multiple copies of identical data. This allows an organization to

acquire less physical capacity at the outset and delay acquisition of additional capacity.

(Data is still growing; deduplication and thin technologies merely slow the need to

acquire additional physical capacity.)

Edison’s testing showed that HP 3PAR StoreServ systems have much less physical

storage capacity overhead to manage system features such as snapshots, thin

provisioning and data integrity. The overhead on HP 3PAR StoreServ in this comparison

was approximately 3% compared to NetApp FAS at approximately 11%. NetApp

systems show a further 5% overhead to accommodate space reserved for snapshots. HP

3PAR StoreServ systems have no snapshot reserve.

The testing performed shows that HP 3PAR StoreServ with File Controller

deduplication and compression on the test unstructured dataset was 64% more for the

NetApp system; HP 3PAR StoreServ reduced the dataset by 24% compared to NetApp

FAS at 17%.

Given 100TiB of raw storage, the HP 3PAR StoreServ solution would provide 64.61TiB of

usable capacity after system overhead and RAID-6 (4+2). In comparison the NetApp

FAS system provides only 59.38TiB after overheads and RAID-6 (3+2). When applying

the potential dedupe savings as observed in this analysis, the HP 3PAR StoreServ

system would be capable of storing 90.01TiB of usable capacity due to the reduction in


duplicated data. In comparison, the NetApp FAS system was less efficient, resulting in

an effective usable capacity of only 71.65TiB.

The figures are represented in the following table and have been adjusted to ensure the

RAID overhead is comparable between both systems. These figures are also illustrated

in Figure 1 on page 2.

Metric

Adjusted RAID-6 Values

HP 3PAR StoreServ NetApp FAS

Physical (TiB) 100.00 100.00

System Overhead (TiB) 96.91 89.07

RAID-6 64.61 59.38

Usable after Dedupe 90.01 71.65

Table 6 – HP/NetApp Savings Comparison, 100TiB

Overall, HP 3PAR StoreServ systems incorporating the File Controller offer significantly

higher rates of data efficiency for unstructured data when compared to the equivalent

NetApp FAS platform.


Appendix

SUT Configurations

The tables below show the specifications for the two SUT and how the two systems were configured for testing. Table 7 on page 10 provides

an overview of the system specifications

SUT Component HP 3PAR NetApp FAS

Model HP 3PAR StoreServ 7200 with

HP 3PAR StoreServ File Controller

NetApp FAS 3250

Storage Software HP 3PAR OS v3.1.2

Data ONTAP version 8.2.1 (CDOT)

Number of Controllers 2 block and 2 file – 10U Rack space 2 – 10U rack space

Number of Drives 24 24

Drive Type 2 TB NL-SAS (7K RPM) 2 TB SATA drives in SAS enclosure (7K RPM)

Table 7: SUT General Specifications


Table 8 on page 11 provides an overview of the test environment including an overview of array nodes, the networking components and the

staging server used for file copying and as a management station.

ILO/Node Management

Device/Component Label Vendor Device/Component Label Vendor

3PAR StoreServ File Controller v2 (node1) ILO HP TestCluster_01 MGMT NetApp

3PAR StoreServ File Controller v2 (node2) ILO HP TestCluster_02 MGMT NetApp

Storage Management

Device/Component Label Vendor Device/Component Label Vendor

StoreServ Node 1 HP TestCluster MGMT NetApp

3PAR StoreServ File Controller v2 (node1) HP

3PAR StoreServ File Controller v2 (node2) HP

StoreServ Node 2 HP

Shared Resources

Switches

8/24 SAN Switch Not used

6600ml-24G-4XG Network Switch 10 GB Ports used for NAS

Server for DC/Control

HP ProLiant DL 360 G7

Table 8: Test Environment Comparison


System Capacity Metrics4

HP and NetApp use different measuring systems for storage capacity and utilization in the management user interfaces of their products,

which can cause confusion when comparing the relative storage efficiency of the two systems. HP uses the binary Gibibyte (GiB) and

Tebibyte (TiB) formats while NetApp uses decimal Gigabyte (GB) and Terabyte (TB) respectively5. Most of the technology industry

(including hard disk drive vendors) uses the decimal format, mainly out of habit and convenience, as the mental math is easier. However

binary is much more precise, especially when used for comparisons as in this study. Table 9 on page 12 illustrates how the two metrics

differ.

Label Bytes Power Label Bytes Power

1 GB or 1 Gigabyte 1,000,000,000 10003 1 GiB or 1 Gibibyte 1,073,741,824 10243

1 TB or 1 Terabyte 1,000,000,000,000 10004 1 TiB or 1 Tebibyte 1,099,511,627,776 10244

Table 9: Binary versus Decimal Byte Comparisons

The difference between representations may seem insignificant especially at the lower capacity levels, but when comparing large capacity

the greater precision can be significant. For example, the difference between 1 GB and 1 GiB is 7.37 percent, whereas the difference between

1 TB and 1 TiB is 9.95 percent, demonstrating increasing disparity between the two measuring systems as capacities scale.

To limit confusion and increase precision, the comparisons in this study have been normalized to binary values and represented at the

Gibibyte level.


Datasets

The reference file-set for the product comparisons in this test are a selection of actual content from Edison's own IT systems. The files

include Microsoft Office files (DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, PPT, PPTX), Open Office files (ODT, ODS), Adobe Acrobat files (PDF), web pages

generated from SPEC benchmarks, graphics files (typically BMP, JPG, PNG), source and compiled code (JS, PHP, ASP). In general, these

represent the type of file content typically used in most businesses. These files were copied to the arrays creating identical copies of the file

content on each device. Figure 4 on page 14 and the legend list that follows shows a breakdown of the file set of the number of files by file

extension. Figure 5 on page 17 and the legend list illustrates the breakdown by file size and by extension.

Some of these files, such as the Microsoft Office, web pages and source code are highly compressible so the space savings from compression

mostly comes from these files. The other file types, such as PDF, JPG, PNG, audio and of course ZIP, are already compressed and generally

resulted in little or no deduplication or compression savings.


Figure 4: Data Set Breakdown – Distribution of Files by Extension


Distribution by Extension Details

DOCX Files: 11.72%

TXT Files: 11.63%

HTML Files: 11.53%

PNG Files: 11.28%

LOG Files: 9.37%

RESULTS Files: 9.29%

ASPX Files: 7.81%

RAW Files: 6.81%

JPG Files: 4.75%

DOC Files: 4.10%

PDF Files: 3.08%

XLSX Files: 1.40%

XLS Files: 1.08%

DOTX Files: 0.83%

ZIP Files: 0.82%

WMA Files: 0.80%

PPT Files: 0.65%

PPTX Files: 0.60%

CSV Files: 0.48%


AVI Files: 0.29%

CSS Files: 0.26%

MP3 Files: 0.26%

VCP Files: 0.15%

BMP Files: 0.15%

MMP Files: 0.13%

JS Files: 0.08%

SWF Files: 0.08%

VSD Files: 0.07%

GIF Files: 0.05%

RTF Files: 0.05%

ODT Files: 0.03%

ODS Files: 0.03%

Other Files: 0.36%


Figure 5: Data Set Breakdown – Disk Space by Extension


Disk Space Utilization by Extension Details

WMA Files: 32.7% (3.80 GB)

MP3 Files: 12.69% (1.47 GB)

AVI Files: 8.46% (0.98 GB)

DOC Files: 8.23% (0.96 GB)

DOCX Files: 7.71% (915.74 MB)

PDF Files: 6.29% (747.65 MB)

PPT Files: 4.50% (534.37 MB)

JPG Files: 3.76% (446.92 MB)

PPTX Files: 2.34% (278.59 MB)

VCP Files: 1.83% (217.07 MB)

BMP Files: 1.31% (156.19 MB)

ZIP Files: 1.13% (133.98 MB)

HTML Files: 0.81% (95.79 MB)

RAW Files: 0.80% (95.35 MB)

WAV Files: 0.76% (90.57 MB)

SWF Files: 0.64% (75.62 MB)

XLS Files: 0.60% (71.50 MB)


RESULTS Files: 0.58% (69.13 MB)

CSV Files: 0.57% (68.28 MB)

CAMREC Files: 0.55% (64.83 MB)

PNG Files: 0.46% (55.08 MB)

MP4 Files: 0.41% (48.65 MB)

RAR Files: 0.36% (43.31 MB)

XLSX Files: 0.36% (43.03 MB)

TXT Files: 0.31% (36.36 MB)

LOG Files: 0.27% (32.07 MB)

WMV Files: 0.27% (31.99 MB)

IBOOKS Files: 0.14% (16.81 MB)

MOV Files: 0.12% (14.21 MB)

ASPX Files: 0.12% (13.89 MB)

MPP Files: 0.11% (13.59 MB)

ODT Files: 0.10% (11.91 MB)

Other: 0.64% (75.48 MB)


Reference Screen Shots

The screen shots on the following pages provide source references for the data used in this study.

System Capacities

Figure 6 on page 21 shows the post-initialization capacity of the drives in the 3PAR StoreServ array. The cage0 drives were not used in

this study.

Figure 7 on page 22 shows similar information for the NetApp array. Only those drives used in the test aggregate show their effective

capacity.

Figure 8; page 23, Figure 9; page 24, Figure 10; page 25, and Figure 11; page 26 show provisioning data from the 3PAR StoreServ 7200

system. The standard NetApp management software does not provide the same amount of configuration detail; additional software is

required.


Figure 6: HP 3PAR Results


NetApp reserves physical disk space for checksums on all SATA drives, which results in additional reserve capacity and overall lower

usable capacity (typically around an 11% capacity loss).

Figure 7: NetApp FAS Results


Storage Provisioning Reserve

HP 3PAR Provisioning Reserve

Figure 8: HP 3PAR CPG has no system reserve and by default grows into the overall system capacity.


Figure 9: Thin Provisioned Virtual Volumes system overhead is negligible (<1%).


Figure 10: Once the virtual volume is created, CPG maps the space for the virtual volumes, which is 1% of the overall system capacity.


Figure 11: Virtual Copy (snapshots) by default sets a 1% overhead. A 100GB virtual volume has a total overhead of 1.2GB. Copy overhead for fully provisioned and

thin provisioned virtual volumes is the same. There is no additional overhead for the clones.


Endnotes

1 The Digital Universe in 2020, December 2012. 2 NetApp sets aside three drives for a root aggregate at provisioning time. Root contains the array operating system and configuration data. 3PAR utilizes

custom ASICs and other embedded technology for this purpose requiring minimal identity tagging information be written to the array drives. 3 In a past study for IBM, Edison tested compression on a NetApp filer. Although the NetApp system tested at that time was a different model than the

one used in the current study, the nature of the results would be the same today:

A Comparative Evaluation of Block Storage Compression Technology for Multipurpose Storage Environments, July 2012. 4 Historically, the computer industry used Kilobytes (KB) and Megabytes (MB) for storage and memory capacity. These terms were used as a compromise

for the byte multiples that needed to be expressed as power of 2 but lacked a convenient name. In 1998, standards for binary prefixes were established by

the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) giving birth to Kibibytes, Mebibytes, Gibibytes and so forth. This standard has been embraced by

some fields, especially the memory standards by the JEDEC or Joint Electron Device Engineering Council, but the use of Kilo, Mega, Giga and so forth is

still a permitted usage, but the binary prefixes are the endorsed standard. 5 To add to the confusion, HP uses GB and TB when describing the size of the drives in product specifications and non-technical documents.

4AA5-6485ENW

http://www.emc.com/collateral/analyst-reports/idc-the-digital-universe-in-2020.pdf

http://www.theedison.com/pdf/2012_Samples_IBM_V7000_Block_Compression.pdf

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