The document discusses content centric applications, which require new storage architectures optimized for processing and analyzing vast amounts of content. These applications are driving major increases in storage capacity needs. Content centric storage systems must provide high performance, scalability, simplicity of access, and cost effectiveness without compromising functionality. The NetApp E-Series storage system is designed to meet the unique demands of content centric applications through its performance, efficiency, reliability, and ability to integrate with operational environments.

1. Content Centric Applications
Technology Insight Series
Russ Fellows
February, 2012
Eva lua t o r Gr oup

2. Content Centric Applications
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3. Content Centric Applications
Executive Summary
The way in which businesses process, analyze and utilize information is changing, and with these
changes comes an evolution in information technology. A new type of application is developing that in
conjunction with some existing, specialized usages requires storage systems with characteristics aligned
with those applications. The Evaluator Group calls that type of application content centric where the
storage system works with the applications to exploit previously untapped information and business
models. Traditional process centric applications are those where features of the storage system are
exploited for operational benefit. Content centric applications are emerging or exist in many industries
including energy with seismic analysis, entertainment including full‐motion video, medical for streaming
images, government with unique requirements in high performance computing and others.
These new applications require a new architecture, designed and optimized to process and analyze the
vast amounts of content now available. While existing business applications continue to grow, content
centric applications are dramatically increasing and place greater demands on performance and
responsiveness from the storage system. Content centric applications such as video surveillance are
driving capacity increases due to high resolution cameras as well as more surveillance operations.
Research reports published estimate a 20.4% CAGR in content centric capacity through 2015. In media
and entertainment content centric applications, the required digital storage capacity is increasing 7.7X
from 2011 to 2016 due to the use of higher resolution cameras and 3D content. In the healthcare
industry with radiological images, new modalities (such as CT scanners) are increasing in resolution and
captured information. As an example, new CT scanners are requiring 1GB per image storage compared
to 10 to 50MB for the previous generation.
The next generation of computing for content centric application will require even
greater responsiveness and performance as well as a resiliency that may not have
been demanded previously. Storage systems for these workloads must deliver
high performance and reliability while meeting strict price – performance levels
and come from a known, premier storage supplier.
The Role of Storage in a Changing Workload
There are several transformations occurring that are driving these shifts in computing. Processing of
information that was relegated to high performance computing previously is becoming a mainstream IT
operation. Content centric applications depend upon a high performance architecture and require
storage systems designed with a light‐weight set of features that do not comprise performance for the
additional capabilities. These architectures also enable greater availability without imposing cost or
performance burdens.
Storage systems designed for high‐bandwidth, low latency and low cost computing are some of the
criteria required for the content centric computing. While existing transaction based processing on
bounded data sets will continue; the recent growth in IT has come from systems designed for content
centric applications.
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4. Content Centric Applications
Delivery of content and other media is being driven by new demands from consumers and business alike
for rich content. The amount of data and the applications designed to process and analyze these data
sets need to meet narrow performance and price guidelines that general IT storage systems have
difficulty in meeting. In each instance, storage requirements are unique and distinctly different from
traditional IT and transactional processing. These environments require single storage systems that can
grow to multiple petabytes and deliver high levels of availability and performance. The general
requirements for storage by content centric applications include:
 High speed access to data with minimal latency and overhead
 Ability to scale to meet capacity demands
 Simplicity of access to allow content centric application to control management, data
movement, and protection
 Cost effectiveness where the capability for additional features does not carry a cost penalty.
Need for Efficient Storage
Storage systems that meet the requirements for content centric applications still must be efficient to
minimize cost and maximize performance. The efficiencies come in a number of areas and the value
gets amplified as more capacity is required. There are limits to how large a single system can grow.
Attempting to add multiple large systems together often results in inefficiencies, leading to cost
structures that are too high to support the new models of IT computing. Storage for content centric
computing must be highly efficient in order to meet performance demands. The efficiency of storage
systems is measured in several ways including:
 Capital costs of each system
 Operational costs of systems (with a focus on power and cooling)
 Performance (measured by throughput, along with I/O’s per second in some cases)
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5. Content Centric Applications
Efficient storage systems must be designed from the onset to solve the needs of a particular class of
workloads, those demanding efficiency, performance, and now the need for reliability.
NetApp has a focus on creating more efficient storage systems which started with
the FAS systems and is continued with the E‐Series.
Lower Cost and Complexity ­ Greater Performance
The new generation of applications such as video content, streaming media, Big Data and cloud
infrastructure has different requirements than traditional IT.
Data analytics and Big Data processing applications are designed with a different philosophy than in the
past. This class of problems can be broken into multiple pieces and analyzed in parallel, independent of
other analyses. These applications typically operate using a “MapReduce” model that maps or breaks a
problem apart, distributes it to processing elements, and finally collects results therefore reducing the
data. This model is common for Big Data analytics and requires high‐speed processing with direct access
to storage with lower overhead for greater performance.
Reliability and Content Centric Application
A critical difference between research processing and new content centric applications is their
importance to businesses. As these applications move into the mainstream of business processing, the
need for reliability also increases. These applications often developed from laboratory research
environments with a more relaxed view of reliability; the jobs could simply be restarted. With more
business criticality, the reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) aspects of the entire system
become critical. As an example, a problem in a storage system that was not highly reliable or available
may require the analysis to be run again which would be acceptable in a research environment. In a
business environment where the results are used in driving decisions and other business criteria, the
delays caused by problems in a less robust system would have a financial impact.
Integration into Operational Environments
Storage platforms such as NetApp’s FAS and V series have a long history of delivering high levels of
business application integration features, as well as addressing multiprotocol and multi‐tenant needs.
These unified platforms are industry leading in their support of data management and data protection
capabilities and in particular, for the high levels of integration between NetApp FAS / V and business
applications for process centric information in a traditional or clustered environment.
These feature rich storage platforms are designed for process centric applications such as MS Exchange,
SQL Server, SharePoint, as well as Oracle, SAP and other applications that benefit from integrated data
protection features. These traditional workloads rely upon finite sets of structured data, and have
different requirements from emerging content centric workloads.
In contrast, a growing number of workloads demand high bandwidth access to data, providing their own
data protection, redundancy or other data management capabilities. These applications do not benefit
from feature rich storage designed for traditional workloads. Performance is critical to the design of
applications such as video content, parallel filesystems based on Lustre, seismic processing or analytic
processing with Hadoop.
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6. Content Centric Applications
The E­Series Heritage
Design and Architecture
The NetApp E‐Series has a long history of innovation, including contributing to the development of the
SCSI block protocol, delivering the multi‐disk controller using RAID techniques, and providing multiple
RAID levels on a system. More recent leading technologies include early Fibre Channel RAID system,
native InfiniBand connectivity and early endorsement of SPC‐1 storage benchmark results.
NetApp is continuing this heritage of innovation on the E‐Series with further advancements including
faster interface technology. Continued development of features, packaging, scalability and performance
features needed for the new generation of data intensive applications are expected, enhancing the
opportunity with the already half million systems in use.
The E‐Series includes integrated capabilities for data protection and movement of replicated copies of
data that can be externally managed by content centric applications.
Performance
Attaining high performance for content centric applications relies upon fast access to disks without
bottlenecks. Cache can help improve performance for some workloads, but some high bandwidth
applications rely upon direct access to the underlying media. This is in contrast to more traditional
transaction or business processing applications that often benefit from large data caches or tiering of
data.
Providing the industry’s highest speed connections through FC, InfiniBand, SAS, and 10Gb/s iSCSI allows
E‐Series systems to communicate over high speed links with the least amount of latency while
integrating in the network of choice. This design is used for distributed compute clusters, SAN
filesystems, data analytics and other content centric applications.
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7. Content Centric Applications
Storage Density
High storage density is another critical concern in some environments. Large capacity applications with
limited physical space require the highest storage density possible. The NetApp E‐Series uses high‐
density packaging for both Large Form Factor and Small Form Factor disk technology. Coupled with the
density is the ability to intermix different drive technologies including SAS, nearline SAS, and SSD in the
same, dense enclosures.
RAS Characteristics
In environments with thousands, or tens of thousands of disk drives, drive failures are a common
occurrence. While RAID can protect from loss of data when a drive fails, other operations associated
with maintenance can also lead to downtime for storage systems that aren’t designed to achieve high
levels of Reliability, Availability and Serviceability (RAS).
E‐Series have been delivering high reliability since their inception with continued improvements as the
design has been expanded to incorporate the latest technologies. Reliability is only one aspect of RAS
and is dependent upon design aspects to enable continued availability without maintenance or
scheduled downtime.
Real world availability includes measuring downtime for maintenance, upgrades, capacity or
configuration changes. E‐Series systems are able to upgrade disk and controller firmware without
downtime. Adding storage capacity, reconfiguring RAID levels and even RAID level migrations are
features that have all added to enhancing the real‐world availability of E‐Series systems.
System Maturity and Testability
Another component of RAS is the serviceability and implied testability of a system. The design of the E‐
Series has been refined and proven over its 20 plus year history. Many industry standard features such
as mirrored cache in the controllers and support for multiple RAID levels emerged on E‐Series systems.
The evolutionary approach to improvements and feature additions has resulted in a system that is
consistently highly available and reliable.
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8. Content Centric Applications
The maturity of the E‐Series design has led to a collection of test scenarios and test cases that are
continually enhanced to with each additional improvement. By including the heritage of more than 20
years of testing infrastructure and unique customer conditions, E‐Series designers are able to verify that
every feature works across known uses and configurations.
Final Thoughts
The following image show how the E‐Series’ attributes may be particularly well suited to meet the
requirements of the new content centric applications.
A new area of content centric applications is emerging in the world of IT. Driven by
demand from consumers and businesses alike, rich media data is responsible for a
majority of data growth in many companies. These new applications depend upon
high‐speed access to storage to accommodate the petabytes of data demanded.
Data analytics, energy research, genomics, media and a growing number of other
industry applications are part of an emerging set of content centric workloads.
The NetApp E‐Series systems are optimized for content centric applications, designed to provide high
bandwidth connectivity without delay or data management overhead. The history of RAS and other
availability features combined with the price‐performance and density of the E‐Series enable companies
to transition this class of applications from research into business productivity tools.
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9. Content Centric Applications
About Evaluator Group
Evaluator Group Inc. is dedicated to helping IT professionals and vendors create and implement strategies that make the most of
the value of their storage and digital information. Evaluator Group services deliver in‐depth, unbiased analysis on storage
architectures, infrastructures and management for IT professionals. Since 1997 Evaluator Group has provided services for
thousands of end users and vendor professionals through product and market evaluations, competitive analysis and education.
www.evaluatorgroup.com Follow us on Twitter @evaluator_group
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