Author: Dimitris

Posted on

Beware of benchmarking storage that does inline compression

In this post I will examine the effects of benchmarking highly compressible data and why that’s potentially a bad idea.

Compression is not a new storage feature. Of the large storage vendors, at a minimum HPE, NetApp, EMC and IBM can do it (depending on the array). <EDIT (thanks to Matt Davis for reminding me): Some arrays also do zero detection and will not write zeroes to disk – think of it as a specialized form of compression that ONLY works on zeroes>

Continue reading “Beware of benchmarking storage that does inline compression”

Posted on

Are some flash storage vendors optimizing too heavily for short-lived NAND flash?

I really resisted using the “flash in the pan” phrase in the title… first, because the term is overused and second, because I don’t believe solid state is of limited value. On the contrary.

However, I am noticing an interesting trend among some newcomers in the array business, desperate to find a flash niche to compete in:

Writing their storage OS around very specific NAND flash technologies. Almost as bad as writing an entire storage OS to support a single hypervisor technology, but that’s a story for another day.

Continue reading “Are some flash storage vendors optimizing too heavily for short-lived NAND flash?”

Posted on

Filesystem and OS benchmark extravaganza: Software makes a huge difference

I’ve published benchmarks of various OSes and filesystems in the past, but this time I thought I’d try a slightly different approach.

For the regular readers of my articles, I think there is something in here for you. The executive summary is this:

Software is what makes hardware sing. 

All too frequently I see people looking at various systems and focus on what CPU each box has, how many GHz, cores etc, how much memory. They will try to compare systems by putting the specs on a spreadsheet.

OK – let’s see how well that approach works.

Continue reading “Filesystem and OS benchmark extravaganza: Software makes a huge difference”

Posted on

Are you doing a disservice to your company with RFPs?

Whether we like it or not, RFPs (Request For Proposal) are a fact of life for vendors.

It usually works like this: A customer has a legitimate need for something. They decide (for whatever reason) to get bids from different vendors. They then craft an RFP document that is either:

  1. Carefully written, with the best intentions, so that they get the most detailed proposal possible given their requirements, or
  2. Carefully tailored by them and the help of their preferred vendor to box out the other vendors.

Continue reading “Are you doing a disservice to your company with RFPs?”

Posted on

So now it is OK to sell systems using “Raw IOPS”???

As the self-proclaimed storage vigilante, I will keep bringing these idiocies up as I come across them.

So, the latest “thing” now is selling systems using “Raw IOPS” numbers.

Simply put, some vendors are selling based on the aggregate IOPS the system will do based on per-disk statistics and nothing else.

They are not providing realistic performance estimates for the proposed workload, with the appropriate RAID type and I/O sizes and hot vs cold data and what the storage controller overhead will be to do everything. That’s probably too much work.

Continue reading “So now it is OK to sell systems using “Raw IOPS”???”