VMTURBO S VALUE TO NETAPP

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1 VMTURBO S VALUE TO NETAPP NETAPP CUSTOMERS DERIVE VALUE AND NETAPP DERIVES VALUE INTRODUCTION The purpose of this document is to outline the unique value that VMTurbo brings to NetApp s customers, and the direct impact on NetApp s storage revenue. It also underscores the opportunity for NetApp to partner with VMTurbo in spite of having its own management solutions that may currently be perceived to be competitive. One of the existing NetApp solutions, OnCommand Insight Balance does overlap in some areas with VMTurbo; however, there is one critical and important area where the two technologies differ greatly. VMTurbo fills an important gap for NetApp s customers and helps NetApp protect its installed base from competitors. Specifically, OnCommand Insight Balance provides monitoring, reporting and alerting capabilities to detect performance issues in virtualization and storage, but is missing the proactive workload management capabilities to prevent performance and availability problems and resolve any problems that may result from sudden changes in workload demand. VMTurbo Operations Manager and its Storage Extension fills this important gap for NetApp s customers and helps them maximize their investment in NetApp storage. It also helps NetApp protect its installed base from lower-end/lower-cost competitors VMTurbo, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

2 A CUSTOMER PERSPECTIVE AND THE RISK TO NETAPP S CORE BUSINESS Many customers using NetApp storage face specific, unsolved problems related to storage performance and availability, which impacts their ability to economically scale out virtualization. There is an opportunity for VMTurbo to address some of the key challenges NetApp s customers face. In less than three years, VMTurbo has established a base of more than 10,000 users, and over 400 distinct customers who rely on the VMTurbo platform to assure the performance of virtualized workloads and optimal utilization of their virtual infrastructure. The quotes below are taken from VMTurbo customers that use NetApp solutions in their virtual infrastructure deployments. They capture the top of mind issues, which VMTurbo addresses. A recent problem with storage IO performance took us eight weeks and $100K of engineering effort to resolve. We have selected new storage vendors for our VDI project because we cannot provide reliable storage IO performance on NetApp. We estimate we are over-provisioning our NetApp storage by 30% because we cannot effectively dimension and manage IO performance. We have avoided implementing thin provisioning in virtualization and storage because we cannot effectively mitigate the risk of application outages. We estimate we could increase storage utilization by 50% if we could manage this risk. Unaddressed, these issues present a significant risk to NetApp s core business and market share. Many organizations VMTurbo works with have stated that they have replaced NetApp or are considering alternative storage solutions as a way to overcome these issues. The bottom line is that using VMTurbo s solutions allows NetApp customers to address performance, availability and cost challenges, without displacing NetApp storage solutions. A joint solution can help NetApp be more competitive and ensure that NetApp customers maximize their return on investment in storage. THE INTELLIGENT WORKLOAD MANAGEMENT PROBLEM VMTurbo provides a unique software solution, which solves key challenges facing enterprises and service providers who are deploying virtual and cloud infrastructure. Namely, how to meet quality of service objectives for virtualized workloads while maximizing the ROI from infrastructure investments. VMTurbo has solved this Intelligent Workload Management problem with a unique, patented technology. The foundation of this technology is a unified data model and decision analytics that uses economic principles of supply and demand to derive sets of actions that can be executed manually or automatically on an ongoing basis to keep the environment in a state of perpetual health while maximizing infrastructure utilization. VMTurbo recommends resource allocation and workload placement decisions that reduce contention and prevent problems from occurring. These actions include ensuring workloads are placed intelligently across server and storage infrastructure and that physical and logical resource assignment is correctly provisioned across virtual machines, 2

3 hosts/clusters and storage based on workload demand. Using VMTurbo, customers are able to dramatically reduce the cost of delivering virtualized compute services and IaaS by increasing resource utilization/virtual machine density ratios while meeting quality of service objectives. Further, VMTurbo customers reduce ongoing support costs by preventing problems and incidents. NetApp should consider VMTurbo s capability as a Cloud Infrastructure Management Operating System since it acts as an intermediary between all of the infrastructure resources, driving actions to ensure optimal workload performance and infrastructure efficiency. THE STORAGE CONTEXT In the context of storage, the challenges of performance and efficiency management are particularly vexing because of the number of dimensions that come into play, including: Workload demand for storage IOPS, disk space Storage latency experienced by workloads and within the storage fabric The available storage capacity of IOPS within aggregates Disk space utilized on storage volumes The CPU performance of storage controllers The use of thin provisioning, deduplication and compression While many storage management tools can discover, monitor, alert and report on these variables, what is fundamentally lacking is a decision-making capability to determine what actions should be taken to assure workload performance and infrastructure efficiency. To maintain optimal performance and efficiency, a broad set of actions need to be executed on an ongoing basis, taking into consideration all of the aforementioned dimensions. Examples include: intelligent workload placement, volume re-sizing, provisioning new volumes, storage aggregate re-sizing, provisioning of new storage aggregates and upgrading storage controllers, and provisioning new storage platforms. Due to complexity, many organizations overprovision storage to prevent performance issues. However, this can result in significant cost overhead, and, oftentimes, workload performance issues still persist because workload IO demands and the configuration of the underlying storage are misaligned. This is particularly apparent when organizations deploy more complex IO-intensive applications with fluctuating workload demand in their virtual infrastructure. Given the cost premium associated with overprovisioning, alternative storage vendors are displacing NetApp solutions and taking market share. In 90% of use cases, an alternative solution is not necessary when VMTurbo is used to align workload demand with the available storage infrastructure capacity. POSITIONING VMTURBO RELATIVE TO NETAPP S PORTFOLIO SOLUTIONS NetApp s acquisitions of Onaro and Akorri added solutions to NetApp s DATA ONTAP portfolio to address the operational needs associated with problem/incident management and capacity management. In fact, these solutions do not directly address the aforementioned Intelligent Workload Management problem since they do not provide decision analysis, ongoing actions or automation to resolve and prevent problems 3

4 while proactively maintaining infrastructure efficiency. IT operations staff could use NetApp OnCommand Insight products in combination with skilled engineering and support resources to interpret the metrics reported, and drive decisions and actions. However, the scalability of this approach for service providers or large enterprises can easily be called into question, in the context of their overall business drivers to reduce IT delivery costs. The NetApp internal scalability guideline for OnCommand Insight Balance means that the solution is not relevant to many large enterprises and service providers. Furthermore, OnCommand Insight only supports VMware environments and will not address the needs of customers with other hypervisors, such as Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. Multi-tenancy support is also a critical capability for service providers to provide customers with better control and visibility. In this context, support for solutions such as VMware vcloud Director and CloudStack are also important. We understand that these are not capabilities supported by NetApp s management solutions today. VMTurbo was built from the ground up to service the needs of large enterprises and service providers through its ability to: Increase infrastructure efficiency 10-20% by sweating assets while ensuring service level objectives are met Remove non-productive support costs of problem/incident management Scale to environments with tens of thousands of workloads Provide multi-tenancy support Support multiple hypervisors, including VMware vsphere/esx, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization KEY BENEFITS OF VMTURBO: Increase infrastructure efficiency and virtual machine densities 20-30% or more beyond native hypervisor tools Defer future costs associated with new server instances, storage, software licenses, related support services and data center facilities Optimize future investment decisions associated with new projects and technology refreshes Reduce the volume of problems and incidents, thereby reducing associated IT support costs Streamline processes by providing guided actions to resolve identified risks and inefficiencies Simplify capacity management, and minimize the risk of unexpected outcomes through scenario simulation Ensure SLAs are met, minimizing business risk Reliably virtualize more applications, driving down the overall cost to deliver compute services Maximize agility by reducing the time to deploy business-critical applications with confidence 4

5 Case Study: Financial Services Organization BEFORE IMPLEMENTING VMTURBO Customer built out a capacity plan based on a resource allocation model calculated on the percent of over-commitment/risk the consumer of the application could tolerate. This resulted in significant over-provisioning of server and storage infrastructure and high internal costs for consumers of the virtual infrastructure. Ongoing performance issues caused by server and storage resource constraints and congestion resulted in significant non-productive support costs associated with problem/incident management. One to two problems per month impacting the availability of 20 to 30 business-critical applications for several hours. AFTER IMPLEMENTING VMTURBO Using VMTurbo to intelligently place workloads and allocate resources based on utilization goals introduced a 10% increase in overall infrastructure efficiency across the enterprise and resulted in savings of $9M (CAPEX and OPEX) over three years Using VMTurbo, recommended actions to prevent problems and incidents reduced the number of problems/incidents and support tickets, resulting in a savings of $600K over three years in labor cost Using VMTurbo, the customer avoided 20 critical incidents per annum, where the cost associated with business disruption is estimated to be $6 million over three years. CONCLUSION Working with VMTurbo, NetApp can enable its customers to derive greater value from their existing investments while preventing its competitors from gaining ground with its customer base, which is critical to protecting NetApp s ongoing revenue stream. One Burlington Woods Drive Suite 101 Burlington, MA USA