NetApp AFF C190 Review (Editor's Choice Award Winner!)

[Music] hey everyone brian beeler here alongside kevin o'brien at the storage view lab and today we have a partially dissected netapp c190 to talk about in the c190 the c stands for what that i don't know i i don't know either it might stand for channel because it's a channel play so maybe probably yeah it's a channel 190. anyway it's a 2u chassis standard sort of entry storage form factor dual controller active active right so you've got some redundancy there on the controller side a lot of redundant not just some a lot of redundancy you've got maximum redundancy on the controller side and in this case it's a 24 base system so if we move the bezel over you would see that it's populated ours is the all flash configuration with 960 ssds now netapp has done a number of things to keep this cost-effective and really simple and one thing they've done is standardized on this part for the ssd just to make it easier for them to only have to to call and support one drive there and it's available the c190 in a number of configurations 8 16 24 i think and at 24 drives across that's a an effective capacity of about 55 terabytes assuming roughly a three to one data reduction model so for the edge use cases smbs that this is designed for there's a lot of capacity now on the downside it doesn't have shelf expansion yeah although as we've seen depending on how you're leveraging these things you might be running out of io as you increase additional drives so you want usually in those platforms you want to be able to scale out with something a little bit faster and that's where the larger models you go to the a3 series or east like e7 8 series there's a lot of power behind those controllers on these they're really designed to fit the the initial deployment size you could expand capacity but performance are easy to top out with the 24 drive size but you're still getting on tap underneath so we're running uh 97 on this one but it'll support future versions as well and you're getting like i said the redundant dual controller setup and the controllers are pretty beefy for an entry storage product yeah i mean you can get this in either a quad rj45 10 gig platform or in this we have uh converge adapters so these can operate as either ethernet or fiber channel we actually have the fiber channel on these so we get quad 16 gig ports per controller and there's a lot of fun stuff here i mean the airflow that you have through this platform is very nice and you look if you look at this side there's a battery back up in each controller so if this unit loses power it's able to flush everything in flight off to um stack flash so you don't lose any data you're not going to find that and a lot of the platforms out there they might be able to have like a dram buffer for a raid card for example but they're not able to flush everything out into a non-volatile uh storage media and so at a price point where this comes in at sub 20k to start and maybe even more aggressively depending on what your channel partner can offer you netapp is gaining a lot of new customers in fact the word that we've heard is as many as half of the consumers of the c190 are net new netapp customers now that's a big deal for netapp because while they're very successful at the high end in the enterprise they've had the a 200 series which we still run and they've got some other products in that in that a series family there's always a lot of concern where everyone looks at like hey i have x number of dollars to spend wait i couldn't spend it on a netapp or another vendor because i think it's too expensive right and that's another good point is that in a space that's dominated by a lot of you know low-cost nas solutions having something like this available at a price point that's affordable has been really good for netapp now their trick is to get the rest of the world to know about it let's take a look here too we've got a couple slides pulled up and i want to highlight overall some of the uh the the features that we just talked through so to kevin your point block and file single system h a 2u chassis the the effective capacities there are noted as you look at the drive configurations what did we end up with on this on 12 drives yeah so we have a 12 960 configs that gives us probably it's the 24 if we're counting up uh yeah incrementally there and with this uh it is important to note that this uh that effectual capacity is based on the internal drive count if you expand it with a cloud tier for example you can push up beyond that and we'll look at that in uh within ontap uh network configurations you were talking about that as well yeah so file only that is uh ethernet if you want the file and block you can go for the more unified arc or the uta ports which will give you either ethernet or fiber channel support okay and they have the netapp volume encryption uh enabled as well which is which is cool and as noted on tap 696ga or above we ran 9.7 and this will support future versions of course as well so it's not held back there either internal we took a look at the controllers just a moment ago what stands out here kevin in terms of the the two options up for i o well i mean the big thing to understand is you need to figure out which path you're going to take initially since it does change the controller that's being used or the uh the back plane for that controller so make your decision choose your uh path wisely although if you go for the um the non-irj 45 model you can do fibre channel or ethernet so i kind of like that one okay and talking about where this sits in the family we mentioned coming in that it sits below the a series um it's just the new entry storage that hits the bottom of their uh their price floor uh but the performance and scalability it's not bad and the netapp probably should have cheated this thing over to the right a little bit it it works really well i mean you're gonna find areas where yes you can top it out if you're gonna really stress it but if you look at that compared to where you're gonna find other competing low-cost platforms i mean this does a really good job yeah and we've had the a800 in and we've reviewed that and so it's this isn't that obviously it's at the the other end of the spectrum but for the enterprise that's running something like the 700 or 800 in their uh in their core data center having the the 190 out in the field or you know a lower end a200 series gives you that same management uh throughout the stack which is nice for uh storage admins yeah uh to your point before you were talking about cloud tiering and like i said we'll look at that a little bit when we do the tour of ontap but this takes your c190 that's capped on its theoretical capacity and takes it to relatively infinite capacity well not infinite but it allows you to cloud as infinity and beyond right yes but it depends on your license all right but there are a lot of ways where uh it allows you to offload snapshots or other active other cold data that you don't really want clogging up your all-flash array and incidentally netapp's been doing some promotions i've seen online with i think gcp where they're giving away some some licenses there for a period of time so they're making it very easy for people to go play with that functionality and see if they like it yeah so when we look at performance why don't you set the tone for for how you tested this and just to as a reset we we had the 12 drive configuration on this so half populated yeah so we approached this uh the same way that we test any other storage array so we look at its application performance with sysbench mysql sql server uh and our synthetic benchmarks and we don't really hold out anything on this so it's a we run it like we would on any other array and in this in this sense uh for sysbench for example we ran it at a 8vm load normally we would do like 8 or 16 or 32 depending on what the controllers can support in this area we were able to top it out with 8vms at just under 8000 transactions per second and this does pretty well it's important to note where uh the performance that you find on all the current netapp arrays we're testing this with inline dedupe inline compression background data reduction all those features enabled so we're not disabling and testing both with and without dr this is with everything in place and performance is really really good okay on the sequential uh performance you're gonna see around four gigabytes a second and that is fairly impressive for an affordable flash array sure so once you're right this is a little bit lower only 1.4 gigabytes a second but again i mean this is with data reduction enabled which usually like kneecaps a lot of the storage rays once that's turned on right and you've got to remember where these are going to entry storage so it's going to go into professional offices that want serious storage for their operations or maybe even retail to support pos or security systems or whatever so you know it needs it needs to be pretty good and this so far looks like it's meeting that uh meeting that threshold pretty easily yeah and i mean this is good enough where uh you probably can start finding these outside of just retail but think of the areas where maybe test dev needs a platform where the exact same features are going to find on the larger napa rays but it's islanded off and you don't have to worry about them like thrashing one of the bigger arrays well sure you could replicate from one to this one have your current working data set be beat it up and still be using the same platforms yeah so on the random performance we came out at just a bit over quarter million iops which is very nice when you consider again data reductions on um random write performance this is going to come in lower than what we've seen other nab arrays but it's 12 ssds and their entry flash model so this is going to give you above 70 000 iops 4k random right in you could say worst case scenario okay so in terms of the performance profile it's pretty robust for what it is it's all flash so you get all the upside of the the flash benefits probably we should maybe think about reassembling this get it in the rack and take a look at ontap just to show a little tour a little bit louder than we would want in this room it is a little loud for the conference room so we'll put this back together throw it in the rack and keep going all right so we've got the c190 back in the rack and for anyone familiar with netapp systems the ontap interface will look very familiar there's nothing super special about how this works on the c190 but we wanted to take a a little tour and look at some of the highlights and i think this is important for a couple reasons one running on tap 97 so the the current version of ontap 98 will be around the corner which this will also support but one of the big hooks here with the c190 is the management manageability and all the data services so what are we looking at here kevin so this is the new ontap dashboard since it is running uh version 9.7 p6 uh you can still roll back to the uh or not necessarily roll back but you just load in the uh the old interface if you need it some sort of masochist or why would you do that there are certain features that have been brought forward or if you're familiar with the old platform uh and we're still adjusting certain things get moved around but for the the novice on the ontap platform there are a lot of cool things brought forward in the new interface for the guys that are are holding on to the old interface what's the average beard length for someone like that would you say probably greater than one inch okay all right so we're looking at the the modern 97 interface yeah and one of the cool things you get with ontap that uh you're probably not going to find on a lot of the other budget uh platforms cloud tiering i mean there are every single feature that you can do on a a larger ontap platform you can do on this including tiering off to amazon or azure or other services you need the appropriate license for that but you can do that to extend the capacity so you're not just even though this platform you can't expand it uh you can expand it into the cloud to increase your capacity yeah and i think that's a good point we brought that up in the written review too right is that if you've got a a chassis that's limited to those 24 drives even though as we said earlier your effective compressed capacity could be up to 55 terabytes depending on workload and what you're doing that's still 55 terabytes and if you're growing at the edge more than you might expect then being able to connect off to one of your favorite cloud providers to tear out cold data is pretty pretty good deal yeah and it is important to remember it's not just compression it's deduplication that's inline and background right which you're not going to find on a lot of the other platforms in this budget range i mean we've seen other other systems where you're stuck with either block only or file only i mean this gives you a nice unified storage platform so what else stands out to you in the in the ui that you want to highlight it's just really easy to roll through everything i mean you have very quick access into seeing what your fiber channel port status is uh you can create uh new luns the luns in this process um you create a line it'll create corresponding volume that'll sit on but i mean everything is just quick and easy to hit and you can do this from really a tablet if you wanted to there's not everything is nice html5 and really easy to look at and when you roll back to like the dashboard you get to see historical data stats which this is a thing that it was new and on the newest version of ontap where you got this historical performance view or in the past to look at data that was in real time you had to use another like a third-party utility to collect that and present that data yeah i kind of like the network view there and even just the capacity view basic stuff but just helpful to to visualize what you're dealing with yeah but you have a lot of interface capabilities here here you can see you can pop failovers between both nodes on the settings sides you can handle and push firmware updates through the interface now which before you need to mount it on a sift share and fs share that sort of thing now you can do updates to the uh the web gui so there's there you can load the files to the web sure but there's a lot of cool things where it really anything that you need to do including a ton of cli tools where you have that knowledge base which goes back to some of the earliest ontap versions where you're not stuck with the platform that your the neckbeard's in the sysadmin area wouldn't understand you can do literally anything you'd be a storage ninja on this one it just supports everything that you're going to find on other ontap platforms well which is good too because we think about this from an entry storage perspective as maybe a one-off and we know from netapp that they're getting a lot of net new customers with this uh platform through the channel but if you're in a distributed enterprise where you've got ontap in the data center and then a bunch of uh you know i don't know retail stores or or professional offices that you're managing having the same platform makes a lot of sense rather than something specialized at the uh at the edge there yeah of course i mean it's that similarity which makes it a pro i'd say almost a nicer solution than going to a tier 2 platform where it might not be as integrated into your data center somehow you've lost yourself here i know you don't really profess the benefits of data protection and snapshots i actually use snapshots a lot i destroy everything in the lab and uh usually it comes back to rolling in an earlier snap or an earlier fire file revision so we took a look at the the interface we've gone over the hardware you've seen the numbers and in the entry storage space this is a really nice platform and the thing is in my mind that stands out is that when we look at at the sub 25 000 price band which is sort of how we define entry storage there's a lot of stuff there you've got high-end nas from you know like your synology qnap even oscar store those guys that are making rack mountain ass you've got things like true nas that you could put on ix or whatever hardware you want a lot of software to find a lot of other choices dell and hpe both sell uh the the the dot hill the seagate controllers so that's another option at this price point but this is just really strong and really easy to use and it's sub 20k where you can start with this for all flash it's a pretty pretty good deal yeah i mean you there aren't a lot of compromises here usually we've seen things where you're stuck with block only or high performance on the block side but you're stuck with a you want it cost effective you want high performance it's that type of thing where it's like you want three things but you gotta pick two and this one really gives you all those options and adds on data protection adds on the deduplication data reduction all these cool things where i mean it's nice to have them and it really helps benefit a lot of environments where you can help extend that capacity into ways that uh the other solutions might not give you and all the data services and all the stuff with ontap that's been around for you know kind of forever at this point right in the future updates and everything else that comes with that so there's a reason uh where even though you give up the expansion ability of the unit itself if you need to you can go to the a200 family uh which has a number of units we're actually running the a200 in our lab yeah it's been pretty good that we forgot to send back after we reviewed it and that's okay for us but the c190 for its part really strong it's it's a great value with all the enterprise data services and that's why we gave it an editor's choice this year and one of only a handful we've given out in the entire year uh so we're we're real happy with it and we think the edge and remote use cases will too yeah all right thanks for tuning in

Channel: StorageReview

Views: 1,874

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Work from home, enterprise it, small business, SMB, netapp, c190, fast, storage, tech, technology, review, reviews, help, with, understanding, low cost, low-cost, solutions

Id: qvVEuvDj6qU

Length: 18min 55sec (1135 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 11 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/ctroyp]

I say "Cloud-190"