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Enterprise applications

Epic on ONTAP efficiency

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Epic runs on all-flash arrays where most of the cost is the disk. Therefore, storage efficiency is critical for cost savings.

NetApp inline storage efficiency achieves industry-leading savings on storage with no effects to performance, and we even offer a written efficiency guarantee with the all-flash arrays.

When calculating storage efficiency, it is important to measure raw to usable to effective capacity.

  • Raw capacity Before any RAID is applied, size of disk by number of disks.

  • Usable capacity After RAID is applied, how much usable storage is available.

  • Effective capacity How much storage is provisioned and presented to the host or client.

The figure below is a sample efficiency calculation of a typical Epic deployment including all workloads requiring 852TB of effective storage and with 5.2:1 efficiency delivering 1.32PB of total effective data.

Note Based on the number of disks, raw-to-usable capacity varies slightly.

Epic storage efficiency

Note NetApp does not use NetApp Snapshot technology or thin provisioning to calculate efficiency in the guarantee program. Doing so would show unrealistic efficiencies of 30-100:1, which do not mean anything when sizing real-world storage capacity.