Hitachi Gives NetApp Hot Wheels

PHOENIX -- Storage Networking World Spring 2003 -- Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has taken a bit longer than it expected to fasten Network Appliance Inc.'s (Nasdaq: NTAP) NAS facemask to its back-end SAN storage.

But now, HDS says it has a higher-performance NAS solution than NetApp is able to offer itself.

HDS, which is having to play some serious catchup to EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) in the NAS space, today is announcing the availability of HDS NetApp Enterprise NAS Gateways, special-purpose NAS servers that can attach directly or via a Fibre Channel SAN fabric to HDS's high-end Lightning or midrange Thunder storage arrays.

Originally, when HDS and NetApp announced their partnership in December 2002, they expected to deliver their first jointly developed product in the first quarter (see HDS OEMs NetApp: Big Deal? and HDS Ships NetApp NAS Gateway).

Kevin Sampson, director of product marketing for NAS at HDS, says there was considerable testing and training that the companies had to conduct to get the products to market. Specifically, NetApp modified its Write Anywhere File Layout (WAFL) file system to enable the use of Hitachi's own underlying RAID controllers, he says."The WAFL has been modified to take advantage of our RAID," Sampson says. "There was a lot of engineering behind this... We think we can deliver the RAID more quickly using our controllers, rather than using WAFL RAID." NetApp won't sell the gateways; these are strictly Hitachi products.

One of its first customers for the HDS/NetApp NAS gateway is Philips Medical Systems, which makes X-ray equipment, MRI, and CT scanners. The company picked the NetApp FAS940c running with a Hitachi Lightning 9970V because it was looking for better scaleability and performance. According to Harry den Harink, a Unix systems manager at Philips Medical Systems, initial testing showed the performance of the HDS/NetApp NAS system to be three times faster than Philips's current production environment.

Apart from better performance and scaleability than NetApp would be able to provide with its own standalone filers, Sampson says, the HDS/NetApp gateway functions identically to a NetApp box. It runs the same software -- NetApp's Data OnTap 6.4 -- and HDS is also reselling NetApp's Snap mirroring software.

"A customer using the gateway would see and experience it as if it were a NetApp box," Sampson says.

But if it walks like a NetApp filer and talks like a NetApp filer, isn't it better to buy it from NetApp, which built it in the first place? HDS says the gateway merges the best of both SAN and NAS: It has the file-sharing features and simplicity of NAS, while offering the horsepower and centralized management of a SAN."For customers who have SAN footprints today, if they go out and buy NAS, it's a separate island of storage," says Sampson. "One of the big gripes of NAS is backup and restore. With this solution, it's treated just like SAN data, so I can back it up and restore it over the SAN."

Architecturally, the HDS/NetApp is identical to EMC's Celerra, which provides a NAS front-end to its Symmetrix or Clariion storage arrays (see EMC Darts Into Midtier NA$). HDS was unable to say exactly how or why the NetApp-based NAS gateway is superior to Celerra. The most Sampson will say is that he's "very confident that we're competitive in terms of performance, scaleability, and price" with EMC's offering. HDS did not release pricing information for any of the systems.

In teaming up with NetApp, HDS scrapped its previous NAS strategy, which was based on systems from Network Storage Solutions (NSS) (see HDS Gets NAS Religion). HDS customers had been asking for a better NAS approach, so the company looked for a partner that would help it get to market quickly. "We looked at all of the vendors except one -- I'll let you guess which one that was," says Sampson. [Hint: It begins with E and rhymes with hard currency.]

The rack-mountable HDS/NetApp NAS gateways include two models for the Lightning 9900V series, which are shipping now: The GF940, which can handle up to 9 TBytes, and the GF960, which handles up to 48 Tbytes. Customers must purchase a separate gateway -- the GF825, which provides up to 3 TBytes -- to attach to Thunder 9500 V systems; that version will be available June 30. The model numbers of the HDS/NetApp gateways, you'll notice, correspond to those of NetApp's current product family. Later in the year, HDS will make the GF825 available for the Lightning.

In the pipeline is an embedded eNAS blade, internally developed by Hitachi's storage engineering team in Japan. The eNAS will plug directly into a Hitachi array and more fully integrate SAN and NAS storage.Todd Spangler, US Editor, Byte and Switch