Question : Problem: Netapp and Equallogic experiences

I've been looking closely at the Netapp 2050 and Equallogic entry level PS series (still unsure which disk shelf).  I realize I'm not really comparing apples to apples as one is a SAN and one is a NAS, but I'm still deciding which one to

We'll be using it for NFS shares, Exchange, possibly some SQL databases, and host other various VM guest OSes that aren't demanding (ie. BES, DHCP, internal web servers).  I'd run clustered servers in the primary site, and a single server in DR.  I'd mirror most LUNS to the DR (SATA only), use snapshots, and mirror those as well.  I'll be pushing my snapshots to LTO tape.  Most will be done with a two node HA ESX 3.5 cluster.  Exchange 2007 will likely be used, with a two node CCR setup.  This will require a migration from our current single 2003 DAS server.

I've been slowly making a pros cons list, and so far I'm leaning towards the Netapp for the NFS support.  No intentions of deduping at this point in time.  However, my concern with Netapp is performance.  The Dell I'm guessing can keep up, but its limited features and inability to resize LUNs on the fly when using them with VMFS is very frustrating.  The Dell seems to be the cheaper option so far.

Please post experiences and comments regarding the Netapp vs. Equallogic.  From what I understand, Netapp has polished up some performances issues with the newer versions of OnTap (7 and up from what I understand).  Our NFS shares are very dynamic as they're often used to store large, temporary files.

Also, how did you accomplish your performance testing?  I will very soon have a Netapp and Equallogic side by side, and don't have a lot of experience doing performance testing with a NAS or SAN.  Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.  What were your experiences like when dealing with the support teams?   I'm sort of afraid of the using the word "support" and "Dell" in the same phrase, but am told it's done by the old Equallogic team prior to the acquisition.

Answer : Problem: Netapp and Equallogic experiences

>Technician said that unlike a typical SAN architecture, the random workers will perform better on a Netapp filer.

... compared to other SANs, not compared to sequential I/O. You probably misunderstood the tech (or perhaps the tech isn't a very good one).

You simply can't compare random I/O to sequential I/O. That would be like comparing a big truck to a sports car. Which one has better performance ? Perhaps the truck has better performance for carrying big loads and the sports car for pure speed. But you don't compare the performance between a truck and a car.

If you compare a Netapp to e.g. Equallogic, you will probably find little performance difference doing sequential I/O. However for random I/O, esp. write I/O you will find that the Netapp probably performs better, provided you compare similar systems (same category of controller, same number of disks, using active snapshots on both systems, etc...)

The fact that random I/O is much slower on *any* system, is caused by the limits of the physical disks. A single disk can only do about 150 IOPS if doing pure random I/O due to the latency of the disk.