NetApp EF-Series as Backup Store for NetApp HCI
Channel: scaleoutSean
Date: 30/12/2020

By simply reading the EF-Series data sheet we can tell the current line up of all-flash models can deliver multiple GB/s. But what about VMware environments? What about performance levels we can expect from a *single* VM?

Last year I did a video with Veeam parallel backup using NetApp HCI with E2824 iSCSI (like EF280, but hybrid, although this one had an all-HDD configuration) in which I got around 700 MB/s full backup performance with four Veeam proxy VMs, but I wasn't happy about that test because that environment had some problems outside of my control.

This time I had access to a non-retail H615C (FC HBA) but I think that doesn't impact validity of this testing because I didn't get to use more than the bandwidth I could get with iSCSI on a H615C.

This video shows several runs of DiskSpd executed from a VM:
a) NTFS striped volume (8kB block size, two VMDKs)
b) ReFS (64kB block sizes, single raw device)
c) ReFS (64kB block size, striped across 4 raw devices)
d) [non-DiskSpd] ReFS read performance (by restoring native non-compressed SQL Server backup to NTFS striped volume from (a), above

All volumes were created on a DDP spread across 24 SSDs in the EF280, which is something one might have when using EF280 for backup pool.

In conclusion, a VM connected to EF280 can easily deliver full backup performance of 1 GB/s (single Datastore), and more with multiple Datastores or Raw Devices. If you have a single VM or application that's large, you could backup to (and restore from) a striped volume located either on VMware Datastores or Physical Raw Devices.