The New NetApp NearStore R200 Filers

Joe St Sauver, Ph.D.
Director, User Services and Network Applications
joe@uoregon.edu

One area where that article was necessarily vague was with respect to the production "filers," or data storage units, that were still in the process of being procured as we went to press. Because those filers are now installed and are really the heart of the new Darkwing, we wanted to follow up with some information about them.

What Filers Are We Using?

The UO purchased a pair of Network Appliance R200 filers (http://www.netapp.com/products/nearstore/r200_ds.html ) to build the new Darkwing. Because network attached storage isn't a particularly "sexy" part of computer and network systems, Network Appliance (NetApp) may not be a household name like Dell or Apple. Nonetheless, the company is the market leader in the network attached and unified storage market and according to Gartner, it controlled 52% of the market share as of 2004.[1]

The R200 shares many features with NetApp's more expensive filer lines, differing from its more traditional network attached storage devices primarily in that it uses inexpensive (slightly slower) ATA disks rather than far more expensive (and slightly faster) traditional SCSI drives.[2] In particular, the R200 runs the same NetApp Data ONTAP custom operating system that all other NetApp filers use (see http://www.netapp.com/products/software/ontap.html ), and it offers, among other functions:

1. RAID data protection, which ensures that if a disk fails and needs to be replaced, the system can recreate the information that was on that disk from other members of that RAID set
2. The ability to take snapshots of the contents of a filer at a given point in time so that backups or other tasks can be performed from that snapshot without the need to limit ongoing activities
3. The ability to restore individual files from periodic snapshots
4. The ability to synchronize the contents of a primary filer with a second redundant/backup filer located at an alternate location on campus
5. The (eventual) ability to access data stored on the R200s, not just from Darkwing (via NFS), but also from Windows PC hosts on campus (via CIFS)

You may have noticed the new filers are delivering snappy performance. This is evident in vastly improved web page load times and faster email performance.

As part of the installation of the new production filer, Darkwing users now have a default quota of 250MB effective April 6th, 2005. Users who already had Darkwing quotas at or above that level will of, course, continue to have their higher value.

As deployed, the primary and backup R200s each have 8TB of disk, however the R200s are extremely scalable and may be expanded to up to 96TB each as the university's disk storage requirements grow over time.

Notes

[1] http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/050323/235696_1.html

[2] Unlike traditional database applications, the difference in speed between ATA and SCSI drives is immaterial for Darkwing's "bread-and-butter" applications, email and serving web pages.