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Last week, NetApp announced a guarantee that customers would use 50% less storage than traditional arrays by going with a NetApp FAS solution.  Of course, the tightly-knit group of storage bloggers were all over this announcement pointing out the “flaws” with it.  Some choice quotes:

• StorageZilla (EMC):  “One has to ask is it really putting your money where your mouth is if you’ve been sure to rig the game so you can’t lose? 50% reduction with de-dup for low change rate heavily redundant data? Hell, you’re not even supposed to pick up the phone unless you’re running over 80% capacity and if you hit that number with one of the specifically defined data sets they support it means you probably don’t have de-dup switched on or have a pile of pre de-duplication snapshots stinking the place up somewhere.”
• The SAN Technologist (Independent blog, but employed by Dell/Equilogic):  This post is pretty fair about the entire issue, but compares it to Harley Davidson stating that motorcycles reduce tire needs by 50%.  “I just thought it was funny that the baseline for storage chosen wasn’t another RAID6 based configuration, but comparison to a RAID10 deployment.”
• Chuck Hollis (EMC):  Too much to quote effectively, but the standard response of RAID-10 vs. RAID-DP, along with a lot of the other caveats that the guarantee includes.  This is probably the most thorough vendor response that I’ve read.
• Robin Harris (Independent Analyst):  Robin didn’t discuss the guarantee, other than use it as a jumping-off point for primary storage de-dup.  “If the feature is free, de-duping some primary storage will be standard practice in most data centers within 5 years. As the de-dup technology improves and Moore’s Law drives performance, more and more unstructured data will be de-dup’d as a matter of course.”
• Scott Lowe (Independent Storage Professional):  On the Storage Monkey’s blog (Full Disclosure – I’m a member of the forum site), Scott asks for opinions but doesn’t share his (other than the common RAID-DP vs RAID 10).  “I’ll keep my thoughts to myself, except to say I disagree with the requirement that the baseline system (against which the customer’s system will be measured to determine if the 50% reduction is being met; more requirements here under “How it works”) use RAID 10.”
• Craig Simpson (HP):  “Of course some simple math shows that RAID 5 or 6 would save around 40% (43% for the case they chose) over RAID 1 on anybody’s array. So with all the other tools and restrictions their guarantee only saves another 7% over vanilla RAID 1.  Did they really think people wouldn’t do the math?”
• Jon Toigo surprisingly stayed out of the entire discussion.

After reading through the sheer amount of commentary surrounding this announcement, including NetApp’s own blog post in it, I think that this entire marketing “stunt” was brilliant.  First off, similar to IBM’s stealth launch of several storage products in the past month, this received a lot more commentary than most storage announcements.  From a “getting the product and message out there” perspective, NetApp received a lot of publicity for a fairly low amount of work.  At the very least, for any storage RFP in a VMware environment, competitors will have to answer why they feel the guarantee isn’t valid, and why they don’t have a similar guarantee.  After all, if it means “nothing,” then why don’t other vendors offer it?

After reading through the requirements, I believe that this is primarily for getting into the datacenter of new customers.  First off, the requirement for Professional Services isn’t too significant, since any new technology purchase typically comes with a PS engagement.  Secondly, from the NetApp blog posting about this offer:  “Once customers see the other advantages we have, in terms of performance efficient snapshots, rapid and efficient cloning and provisioning techniques, rapid data backup and recovery, and un-compromised data protection, they will realize a whole new way to manage their storage in a VMware environment.  Come for the space savings, and stay for the simplicity, efficiency and ease of use. Wouldn’t you like to try it?”

All guarantees have fine print.  I’m not exactly sure how any storage vendor would make a guarantee without similar requirements (Professional Services engagement, follow the best practices).  That doesn’t mean that the results are not achievable without PS… just that the guarantee requires them for it to be valid.  Let’s go to Craig’s quote above:  “So with all the other tools and restrictions their guarantee only saves another 7% over vanilla RAID 1.”  First off, I assume he meant to put RAID 5 there, and not RAID 1.   Only 7%.  On one hand… it is a 7% guarantee that no one else has.  On the other hand, 50% is the MINIMUM that is guaranteed.  I would love to see statistics in 6 months as to how much over that most customers achieve.

John Martin (NetApp) comments over at the SAN Technologist blog about the math behind it, and shows that without taking parity into account, a 41% reduction is likely.  Of course, 41% isn’t as sexy of a marketing term as 50%.

In the end, though, what this really comes down to is how much does a given vendor’s solution cost to achieve a given result… all of the guarantees really don’t mean anything if 50% of NetApp storage is equivelant (or more) TCO-wise compared to <insert random storage vendor here>’s storage.  Which is why I have to laugh at this tempest in a teapot… not one person mentioned the cost for a given deployment and compared it to the NetApp deduped deployment.  Because, quite honestly, customers really shouldn’t care about what technologies are used to achieve something, just that it is achieved as cost effectively and maintainable as possible.

Which is also why I thought the squawking about XIV using only mirrored storage was misplaced… but that’s one for another day.