Musings on storage, tuning, backups and more – delivered with a no-nonsense approach. By Dimitris Krekoukias
My colleague Vaughn Stewart explains it in detail here. I didn’t feel we gave this the publicity it deserves.
In a nutshell: We have numbers (published only after VMware engineering themselves approved the paper as accurate and gave their permission) proving that, compared to traditional arrays, running virtualized workloads on NetApp gear needs less resources while providing excellent performance.
Continue reading “NetApp benefits for virtualization – benchmarked and proven”
Haven’t blogged in a while, way too busy. Against my better judgment, I thought I’d respond to some comments I’ve seen on the blogosphere, adding one of my trademark extremely long titles. Part response, part tutorial. People with no time to read it all: Skip to the end and see if you know the answer to the question or if you have ideas on how to do such a thing.
It came to my attention that EMC is offering a 20% efficiency guarantee vs the competition (they seem to be focusing on NetApp as usual but that’s besides the point in this post). See here.
Now, I won’t go ahead and attack their guarantee. Good luck with that, more power to you etc etc. They need all the competitive edge they can get.
I come across all kinds of FUD, and some of the most ridiculous claims against NetApp regard usable space. I won’t post screenshots from competitive docs since who knows who’ll complain, but suffice it to say that one of the usual strategies against NetApp is to claim the system has something like well under 50% space efficiency using a variety of calculations, anecdotes and obsolete information. In one case, 34% usable space 🙂 Right…
It’s come to my attention that pretty much every storage manufacturer is trying to imitate NetApp’s thought leadership and keeps announcing “Unified Storage” products. Everyone can do it now, it seems 🙂
Now, this post is not going to be bashing them or claiming they don’t work.
This post is about arguing what “Unified Storage” really means. And, more importantly, whether you should care about the differences.
Continue reading “What exactly is Unified Storage and who can sell it to you?”