NetApp's GX Targets HPC

After taking 31 months to integrate code acquired from Spinnaker for $300 million, Network Appliance has finally made its Data Ontap GX operating system for clustered NAS available. (See NetApp Ships Data Ontap GX.)

The new OS does not supplant NetApp's Data Ontap 7G operating system for commercial NAS. For now, the GX OS is available on NetApp's midrange FAS3050 and enterprise FAS6070 arrays. It incorporates global namespace and file stripping, two features that earmark the new OS for high-performance computing (HPC) and vertical markets, such as entertainment, oil and gas, and chip design. (See NetApp Annexes Spinnaker.)

Global namespace lets NAS systems scale to petabytes, and users can access data while it is moving between controllers and arrays. GX's file striping lets volumes scale across nodes for a performance improvement.

Pricing starts at $212,000 for a configuration of two FAS3050 nodes, Data Ontap GX, and 7 Tbytes of storage.

All this is aimed at NAS customers craving speed. "High-performance computing is a portion of the market specifically characterized by people creating large-scale computer farms," says Rich Clifton, GM of NetApp's network storage business unit. "This is a place where people continue to push the leading edge of what you can accomplish."It's also a place where other, smaller vendors are pushing ahead. While NetApp and EMC have consistently led the NAS market space, relative newcomers such as BlueArc, Exanet, Ibrix, Isilon, ONStor, and Panasas have made headway in HPC with clustered systems.

One prospective customer explains his interest in faster NAS. "You want speed, and you want to have extra horsepower in the head when you're hitting the saturation point of your network," says Kelly Carpenter, senior technical manager for the Genome Sequencing Center at Washington University at St. Louis.

Carpenter was not a beta tester, but he's interested in getting ahold of the new OS for a performance improvement. Global namespace isn't quite as important to him, since he's only running six NAS filers.

"If you have a bunch of NetApp boxes, [this is] a great thing," Carpenter explains.

At least one analyst thinks it will be awhile before GX hits the enterprise. "NetApp is changing more dramatically than in the last seven years," says analyst Arun Taneja of the Taneja Group. "This is a new beast, which they're targeting for HPC first. Eventually it will be a commercial product, but it will probably take two years before they put in all those bells and whistles."The missing bells and whistles are most of NetApp's data protection software applications, such as SnapLock and SnapVault. Clifton says GX will make it to commercial markets with those features, but it doesn't sound like NetApp is in a hurry. (See NetApp Nudges Closer to New OS.)

"In the long term, GX will get to the commercial market," Clifton says. "We feel like we have a stronger lead with Ontap 7G for commercial business."

To make its case for GX as a speed demon, NetApp published an NFS record benchmark of 1,032,461 operations per second using Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) standards. But that record was set with 24 nodes and 96 chips. While fast, it's not as impressive from a price or performance standpoint. According to SPEC's Website, BlueArc's Titan 2200 achieved 195,502 operations per second and Exanet's ExaStore hit 143,880 operations per second with two-node clusters using the same benchmark.

"If you're a NetApp shop, this is better than what you have," says one analyst who asks to remain unnamed. "Is it light years ahead of what's on the market? No."

Dave Raffo, News Editor, Byte and SwitchOrganizations mentioned in this article: