Musings on storage, tuning, backups and more – delivered with a no-nonsense approach. By Dimitris Krekoukias
It’s that time of the year again. The usual websites are busy with news of the upcoming EMC midrange refresh called VNX. And records being broken.
(NEWSFLASH: Watching the webcast now, the record they kept saying they would break ended up being some guy jumping over a bunch of EMC arrays with a motorcycle – and here I was hoping to see some kind of performance record…)
Continue reading “Questions to ask EMC regarding their new VNX systems…”
This is going to be a mercifully short entry. I’m saving the big one for another day 🙂
One of the features of NetApp storage is that by using Converged Network Adapters (CNAs) one can use a single wire and transport over that FC, iSCSI, NFS and CIFS, at the same time.
Following the new NetApp block-based SPC-1 results yesterday, here is some NAS benchmark action. This page contains all the SPEC SFS results. SPEC SFS is the NAS equivalent of SPC-1.
SPEC SFS is more cache-friendly than the brutal SPC-1, click here for some more information regarding this industry-standard NAS benchmark. The idea is that thousands of CIFS and NFS servers have been profiled and the benchmark reflects real-life NAS usage patterns.
Continue reading “NetApp posts new SPEC SFS NFS results – far faster than V-Max with Celerra VG8”
The SPC-1(E) benchmark is the standard high-intensity test for block storage, consisting of very stringent rules and a standard test suite.
SPC-1 is one of the worst things you can do to a disk array. The benchmark itself does a lot of writes (about 60%), is highly random and is hostile to most caching systems. Which neatly explains why IBM has all kinds of system submissions but doesn’t show XIV, and the complete absence of another prominent vendor (look at the submissions, you’ll figure it out – the big boys of storage are NetApp, IBM, HDS, HP and one more 🙂 ).
NetApp has been selling our custom cache boards with flash chips for a while now. We have sold over 3PB of usable cache this way.
The question was raised in public forums such as Twitter – someone mentioned that this figure may be more usable Solid State storage than all other enterprise disk vendors have sold combined (whether it’s used for caching or normal storage – I know we have greatly outsold anyone else that does it for caching alone 🙂 ).
Continue reading “Has NetApp sold more flash than any other enterprise disk vendor?”
[Update: some grammar mistakes fixed and a few questions added]
Before anyone starts frothing at the mouth, notice that in the categories this post is part of FUD 🙂 Always do your own analysis… I just wanted to give people some food for thought, like I did when FASTv1 came out. I didn’t make this up, it’s all based on various EMC documents available online. I advise people looking at this technology to ask for extensive documentation regarding best practices before taking the leap.
Continue reading “A look at EMC’s FASTv2, FAST Cache and FLARE30 – EMC giveth, EMC taketh away”
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”Âť 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?”
I watched “The Invention of Lying”Âť movie the other day. Fairly entertaining, and it had an interesting concept:
Imagine a society where nobody can lie – the very concept of lying is alien and never even enters anyone’s mind. Obviously, tons of jokes can be made using that premise, and the movie is riddled with them – such as their fictional Pepsi ad: “Pepsi: when they’re out of Coke”
This is going to be another post that was inspired by sheer frustration.
It’s one thing talking to someone about adopting a totally new platform and meeting with resistance – I get it, it’s not what they’re used to, it’s new stuff, they don’t know if it will work etc. etc.
Continue reading “Are you using the features of your existing platforms? And, if not, why not?”
Another one came in. I’ll keep calling the offenders out until the craziness stops. Fellow engineers – remember that, regardless of where we work, our mission should be to help the customer out first and foremost. Then make a sale, if possible/applicable. I implore you to get your priorities straight. If it looks like you’re losing the fight, figure out what your true value is. If you have no true value, you always have the option of bombing the price. But please, don’t sell someone an under-configured system.
Continue reading “More tales from the field: Sizing best practices – does Compellent follow them?”