I am looking at two different NAS/SAN solutions: EMC's NS500 with a CX500 and HDS 9570 with clustered NetApp G270 filer heads. I would like to know your opinion about these solutions, as well anything I should take into account in regards to the NAS portion and performance. In your experience, have you seen a great performance variance between the NS500 and the gFiler? Will the processor and cache differences make a significant impact on performance?
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I'm not sure that the NetApp FAS270 is offered as a separate gFiler. The smallest gFiler I believe is the GF920 (and GF920C for a fault tolerant version). There are performance differences and I recommend going to www.spec.org and looking at the NFS benchmarks there. Every environment is slightly different, but that is an independent benchmark (not a lab that was paid to run a vendor specified test) which is a great place to start.
Performance is one thing to take into account. A few others are:
- Maximum capacity supported.
- Cache memory.
- Number of back-end (Fibre Channel) connections to disk.
- The types of disk arrays supported.
- Features, and how they work: Snapshot, remote copy and aggregated management.
This was first published in March 2005