Hi everyone,
today I have a report from the field. In a customer project, an old HP P2000 was replaced by a NetApp AFF A200.
Initial situation
The P2000 had eight datastores, each with CA. 2 TB provisioned to an ESXi cluster. In sum there was 11.6 TB provisioned capacity and 10.7 TB real used capacity by virtual machines. 18.8 TB was presented as total capacity to the ESXi hosts. 
New storage
To renew his storage infrastructure, the customer has opted for a NetApp A A200 in the Express pack with 24 * 960 GB SSDs. The ESXi hosts are connected via two 10 GBE adapters and the datastores are provided via NFS from the AFF A200. After the complete migration of all HP P2000 VMFS Datastore’s virtual machines to NetApp NFS Datastores, I was able to find remarkable savings. 
The efficiency rate is very remarkable 2.67:1. The previously 10.7 TB real capacity on the P2000 has been reduced to 7.3 TB through consistent thin provisioning. 
These remaining 7.3 TB were then steamed down again by the inline deduplication and inline compression of the AFF A200 to finally 2.73 TB!
And that’s actually just the data reduction ratio. So no snapshot savings included.
The whole thing of course with incredible latencies of consistently under 1 ms.
To me another proof of the phrase: “Storing is boring”! The immense savings potential of all-flash systems prove that all-flash is no longer a future technology. All-Flash is the present!
It is neither contemporary nor economical to ignore all-flash and continue to set on rotating hard disks. Yes SSDs have a higher purchase price.
Just ask yourself the following three questions:
- How many HDDs would I have to buy in order to use the capacities classically?
- Could I have improved the speed of my storage system with the number of HDDs?
- How much power do my classic HDDs consume as opposed to an all-flash environment?
I think the savings presented here speak for themselves.
Thank you for reading
kind regards
DerSchmitz
Disclaimer: This post represents my personal observations and is not officially authorized by NetApp or others. misinterpretations or misunderstandings reserved.