Notes from our meeting with the IT Director at Gerber Scientific.
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Background
In response to an inquiry from a Wikibon member, Wikibon requested and IBM provided a reference to an SAP shop running XIV. The customer is trying to decide between EMC CLARiiON, HP EVA and IBM XIV. Here’s the information we had about the member’s requirements:
- Installing NetWeaver 7, CRM, ERP, BW, ECC, and IS auto modules;
- Storage targeted for Oracle and SAP to support SAN boot and other critical functions;
- Plans to clone development and QA storage;
- Aggressively pursuing server virtualization across the board;
- Data currently resides on EVA 5000 – would like to migrate from EVA 5000 to the new box for legacy software;
- Targeting around 3,000 users with ESS and EP+BW;
- Strong relationship with HP plus relationships with IBM and EMC;
- Customizing around 20%-25% of the application.
XIV in SAP
To assist the Wikibon member, we met with David Hutchison, who is an IT Director at Gerber Scientific. Headquartered in South Windsor, Connecticut, Gerber Scientific supplies state-of-the-art manufacturing systems for the sign making and other specialty industries. Gerber Scientific is a $500M+ public company. Here’s a summary of the firm’s environment, which runs on a small Brocade SAN:
- Running SAP / Oracle for 1 year on XIV;
- Just under 2,000 users on the system;
- Started out at 4 TBs and grown to over 50TB today;
- CRM, BI, Portal, ERP;
- Migrated from an older set of monolithic and modular arrays;
- Virtualized test & dev; not production;
- Running SAP clones for test and dev on the XIV, which is also supporting production;
- DR is done through Sunguard - RPO is 2 hours; RTO is ~20 hrs.
How is XIV Performing?
Hutchinson indicated to us that performance has been excellent. His previous arrays had back-end spindle constraints that created bottlenecks. In the proof of concept, XIV demonstrated 80,000 IOPs, far more headroom than required for the peak application performance running in production at 15,000 IOPs. The company doesn’t carefully measure response times but end-users are happy with performance.
Some Wikibon members have expressed concern about running test & dev clones on the same array as production. Hutchinson indicated he was concerned at first but has never had a performance issue with this approach.
Why did Gerber Scientific go with XIV
Hutchinson cited four primary reasons for choosing XIV:
- Cost,
- Manageability,
- Consolidation of older monolithic and modular arrays as well as server-based DAS,
- Ability to support business change (flexibility).
Hutchinson stressed that he runs a small shop, and he didn't want to have to keep going back to management to ask for more money. He also stressed that the firm doesn't have full-time DBAs, Unix admins and storage admins, etc...all his people are cross trained and can manage the XIV and any changes, allocate pools, do the mapping, set up snap clones, mount volumes, etc. He says the environment is very easy to manage.
Hutchinson also stressed that IBM service has been incredible. "Best support services in the market. You call and get a live person - when does that happen?" He said his advice would be to make sure you get the XIV A-team to support the initiative—they’re extremely well-informed and helpful.
The bottom line:Hutchinson confirmed all the good things other users have reported about XIV, Hutchinson confirmed: Simplicity, ease of management, 'good enough' performance.
Wikibon Perspective
The Wikibon member’s requirements in our view are very similar to those of Gerber Scientific. Both are relatively small environments running SAP, looking for a simple solution that is easy to manage. As we said in our earlier comments on Wikibon, for shops that want lots of knobs and dials to turn CLARiiON in particular, and EVA also, are better choices. XIV is all about set it and forget it. XIV along with 3PAR, and Compellent are leading the way for block-based storage that is simple, practical, and gets the job done.
The customer’s best relationships are currently with HP, IBM, and EMC, which is important in our view. The best reason to go with HP is the relationship as EVA’s roadmap is still somewhat unclear at this time (although we’ve been hearing about major plans in the works for EVA enhancements which sound encouraging). Also, it is not uncommon for HP in such a situation to pitch the XP 24000, which can provide another alternative to EVA.
It’s important to note that Gerber Scientific is a small environment. In comparing the before XIV and after situation at Gerber Scientific, users should understand that the monolithic and modular systems being replaced by XIV were not current generation (e.g. they were “N-1”). As such we’re comparing an outdated system in terms of complexity, power, cooling, performance, etc to a state-of-the-art system in XIV.
Nonetheless, the core architectures of the traditional systems are fundamentally different from XIV, and we believe the simplicity advantage goes to XIV—hands down.
Bottom line: XIV is easier to manage, and in a smaller shop with fewer resources the primary benefits of the XIV approach will be around simplicity and performance that is consistent and good enough for most applications.