Author: Dimitris

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When Terrified Vendors Attack: The Dell PowerStore Edition

Dell is at it again. This time, they paid Principled Technologies to do some tests in order to produce a ridiculous report trying to compare the high-end HPE Primera to the midrange Dell EMC PowerStore.

I’ll expose some of the more egregious errors in their methodology and overall thinking, but first I want to direct readers to an easy way to impartially compare for themselves, without having to read a FUD document sponsored by anyone at all.

Executive Summary: A Primera 670 is multiple times faster than a PowerStore 9000T, has stronger data protection, and much higher uptime.

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The Harsh Realities of PCIe Lane Shortage in Storage Systems

There are a lot of myths and misinformation, plus more than a modicum of misunderstanding, regarding how storage systems can use available bandwidth, especially with certain newer kinds of media.

I wanted to explain some of the harsh facts of storage system design in the real world, and why one shouldn’t just add up drive speeds to estimate performance.

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HCI Failure Modes and Maintenance

I got the idea for this blog after speaking with multiple customers that were contemplating switching to certain kinds of grid computing/storage (like HCI) without fully understanding the ramifications of doing so.

You see, they were (rightly so) enamored by concepts such as automation, ease of consumption and scaling. But they forgot to ask some very important questions. See here for the dangers of getting too carried away with something new and taking things for granted.

This isn’t a post claiming HCI and grid-type storage constructs are bad. Like any tool, they can be used in various ways, some of them aggressively ill-advised. The point of this post is to help customers ask for the right configuration so they don’t get stuck with a sub-optimal and risky design.

I tried to make this post as short as possible but as someone once said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”. Which, ironically, is a simplification of what Einstein actually said 🙂

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The Loss of Important Knowledge and Acumen Through Perceived Commoditization

I posit that we now have a whole new class of consumer that is completely oblivious to certain hitherto fundamental concepts – and this can lead to poor business decisions and overall sub-optimal execution and results.

I got the idea after a discussion with an ex colleague (that’s now working for a cloud vendor) where he proudly proclaimed that infrastructure is unimportant and uninteresting.

I’ll start generically and shift to IT. The generic aspect of this problem is very interesting, since it’s lowering quality in all sorts of fields.

And never forget: Just because something is widely and easily available doesn’t mean it’s better. It simply means that more people have access to it.

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HPE Memory-Driven Architectures Extend to 3PAR and Nimble Storage

HPE has been innovating in the Memory-Driven Compute space for a while now (for example, HPE Labs’ The Machine project and Gen-Z ).

The driver behind this has been to transform application performance, not by increments but by leaps and bounds. Think orders of magnitude in reduction of execution time. For instance, at an organization performing Alzheimer’s cure research, they had a certain key analytics operation that took 22 minutes for each iteration (and they need to do many, many iterations). With a Memory-Driven system from HPE it now takes 13 seconds. This allows the researchers to reach useful results much faster – which, in turn, means the cure could materialize in a much shorter timeframe.

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Media is Not Created Equal and NVMe is Just a Protocol

In this era of over-marketing and misinformation, it can be refreshing to clarify things for customers.

Allow me to be refreshing regarding NVMe 🙂

NVMe is simply a protocol. Just like SCSI is a protocol. NVMe is most assuredly not a media type. Yet, storage vendors keep talking about “NVMe drives” and customers often think those devices are equal as long as “NVMe” is mentioned.

Alas, that’s not how things work…

Strictly speaking, there’s no such thing as an NVMe drive. Or, at the very least, calling something an “NVMe drive” isn’t enough to describe what that media is, and it’s especially not enough to describe how fast it may be.

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Are Snapshots backups? And what do you need to protect against?

I got the idea for this post from a Twitter thread. I thought such discussions were dead but clearly they’re not, and decided to shed some light on this, having dealt with backup at insane scale in a previous life.

It doesn’t matter what a feature is called – can you use it to recover? And, if the answer is yes, how quickly and under which scenarios? And what are the downsides?

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When Terrified Vendors Attack: The Dell Edition

It recently came to my attention that Dell is now advertising some kind of benchmark that shows one of their platforms can be faster than Nimble in some very specific test of their own concoction.

While I don’t doubt that’s possible (indeed, we could do it the other way around), it may be worthwhile investigating what’s prompting the attack.

I also wanted to point out the various technically fishy points of the benchmark.

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How Nimble Storage Systems do Block Folding

I got the idea for this post after seeing certain vendors claim they were the first and only with certain data reduction technologies (I’m not talking about dedupe and compression). I thought – how come Nimble never made a big deal about this? After all, what those vendors were claiming didn’t seem to be very interesting compared to how Nimble systems efficiently write data… yet those vendors were acting as if they’d cured a particularly virulent disease.

Executive Summary

Nimble systems naturally avoid any wasted space when writing. This is an inherent part of the design and not something that was added later.

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Why it is Incorrect to use Average Block Size for Storage Performance Benchmarking

Just a quick post to address something many people either get wrong or just live with due to convenience.

In summary: Please, let’s stop using average I/O sizes to characterize storage system performance. It’s wrong and doesn’t describe how the real world works. Using an average number is as bad as using small block 100% read numbers shown in vanity benchmarks. Neither is representative of real life.

Using a single I/O size for benchmarking became a practice for a vanity benchmark and to provide a level playing field to compare multiple products.

But, ultimately, even though the goal of comparing different systems is desirable, using a single I/O size is fundamentally flawed.

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Will your Infrastructure Survive if you Disappear?

This one is dedicated to an old friend that’s been asking me to write about certain technologies like a very specific filesystem and whether it should be used as the basis for enterprise storage.

He loves using open source stuff for business, mostly to save money, but also for the control it affords and the sheer pleasure of tinkering (and, I suspect, a modicum of masochistic proclivity).

This isn’t a post against open source (if nothing else, that would be utterly hypocritical since most commercial stuff is at least partially based on open source software).

It’s more about risk mitigation and TCO.

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InfoSight: How Nimble Customers Benefit from AI and Big Data Predictive Analytics

In past articles I have covered topics about how Nimble Storage lowers customer risk with technologies internal to the array such as:

Now, it’s time to write a more in-depth article about the immense customer benefits of InfoSight, Nimble’s Predictive Analytics platform.

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