Speedier Splunk-ing: NetApp SANtricity eases your analytics flow

NetApp’s E-Series gets accelerated

NetApp says the latest version of its E-Series all-flash and disk arrays, along with its SANTricity operating software, makes data analytics apps such as Splunk run faster.

Hadoop and NoSQL database apps are accelerated, quite dramatically under certain circumstances, in the new release as well.

The E-Series disk drive and EF-Series all flash arrays, powered by the SANtricity OS, provide simplified array data access performance without the Data ONTAP data services overhead.

NetApp’s Lee Caswell, VP Products, Solutions and Services Marketing, was keen to emphasis E-Series superiority over white box server-based product in his canned quote; “Our SANtricity software [has] high-bandwidth analytics when delivered on disk arrays and low-latency response times when matched with all-flash media. By combining this performance with enterprise reliability and unmatched density, the E-Series and EF-Series arrays make enterprise storage economically superior to even white-box servers for real-time analytics applications.”

The new OS version provides:

• Increased Splunk search performance by up to 69 per cent compared with commodity servers with internal disks
• Up to 500 per cent better Hadoop performance during data rebuilds with Dynamic Disk Pools versus the performance of commodity servers with RAID 5
• 400GB SSDs can be rebuilt in approximately 15 minutes versus approximately 10 hours for NoSQL databases with commodity servers and direct-attached storage
• Data at rest encryption with less than 1 per cent performance impact versus up to 70 per cent impact on commodity servers with internal disk drives

With Dynamic Disk Pools (DDP) capacity can be increased or decreased on the fly, automatically, with no idle spare drives to manage. The pool dynamically rebalances, and up to 12 drives can be added or removed at a time. There is no requirement for (RAID) parity recalculation.

Dynamic RAID-level migration between levels 0, 1, 3, 5, 6, and 10, changes the RAID level of a volume group on the existing drives without requiring data relocation. DVE (Dynamic Volume Expansion) lets you expand an existing volume’s capacity by using free capacity within the volume group or DDP.

There is a SANtricity Performance App for Splunk Enterprise.

NetApp says SANtricity can be used to build hot, warm, cold, and frozen data tiers inside a single architecture.

The company has taken a leaf out of the Nimble Storage support songbook, saying NetApp AutoSupport's predictive technology speeds issue resolution by up to 60 per cent and reduces P1 cases by as much as 85 per cent.

NetApp will offer preconfigured, proven and validated bundled E-Series kit for Splunk deployments via Arrow Electronics, using integrated reference architectures; think E-Series FlexPod-type things.

Get a SANtricity OS datasheet here (pdf). ®