Musings on storage, tuning, backups and more – delivered with a no-nonsense approach. By Dimitris Krekoukias
Kind of a long hiatus posting (far too busy working on cool stuff) and for you looking for a deep technical post this may not be it… but here goes anyway since the content may also apply to my more usual subjects.
Recently I decided to discard my Luddite membership card and join the hordes of people using network-based services for music.
Continue reading “Is convenience devaluing products? Does quality suffer because of it?”
It was with interest that I watched the launch of EMC’s VNX refresh. The updated boxes got some long-awaited features, EMC talked a lot about how some pretty severe single-threaded bottlenecks were removed, more CPU and memory was put in, and there was much rejoicing.
Not really trying to pick on the new boxes (that will be in a future post, relax :)), but what I thought was interesting was that the code that makes most of the new features a possibility cannot be loaded on current-gen VNX boxes (not even the biggest, the 7500, which has plenty of CPU and RAM juice even compared to the next gen boxes).
Software-defined storage indeed.
It was with interest that I watched some of EMC’s announcements during EMC World. Partly due to competitor awareness, and partly due to being an irrepressible nerd, hoping for something really cool.
BTW: Thanks to Mark Kulacz for assisting with the proof points. Mark, as much as it pains me to admit so, is quite possibly an even bigger nerd than I am.
So… EMC did deliver something. A demo of the possible successor to VNX (VNX2?), unavailable as of this writing (indeed, a lot of fuss was made about it being lab only etc).
Continue reading “How to decipher EMC’s new VNX pre-announcement and look behind the marketing.”
Lately, when competing with VNX, I see EMC using several points to prove they’re superior (or at least not deficient).
I’d already written this article a while back, and today I want to explore a few aspects in more depth since my BS pain threshold is getting pretty low. The topics discussed:
References to actual EMC documentation will be used. Otherwise I’d also be no better than a marketing droid.
Recently, interesting research (see here) from researchers at Ohio State was presented at USENIX.
To summarize, they tested 15 SSDs, several of them “Enterprise” grade, and subjected them to various power fault conditions.