I’m in MN prepping to teach a course (my signature anti-FUD extravaganza), and thought I’d get a few things off my chest that I’ve been meaning to write about for a while. Some Stravinsky to provide the vibes and I’m good to go. It’s getting really late BTW and I’m sure this will progressively get less coherent as time goes by, but I like to write my posts in one shot.
Protecting your existing legacy storage investment with virtualization “do’s and don’ts”
It’s an undeniable fact that many customers, while they would love to use the highly advanced features of modern disk arrays, have already made a big investment in legacy storage. Sure, it doesn’t have all the great features, but it’s already there, frequently there’s a lot of it, and the maintenance isn’t expiring for another year or two so it’s not economically feasible to get rid of it.
So, are there any independent bloggers? Really?
There was some weird backlash against my site and my person recently – see here and here and in the comments here. Chuck Hollis got all uppity about whether I work at NetApp (with, for) or not.
I find it interesting that this only came up when I wrote something pro-NetApp. Wasn’t even anti-EMC.
Continue reading “So, are there any independent bloggers? Really?”
More FUD busting: Deduplication – is variable-block better than fixed-block, and should you care?
Before all the variable-block aficionados go up in arms, I freely admit variable-block deduplication may overall squeeze more dedupe out of your data.
I won’t go into a laborious explanation of variable vs fixed, but, in a nutshell, fixed-block deduplication means that data is split into equal chunks, each chunk given a signature, compared to a DB and the common chunks are not stored.
NetApp disk rebuild impact on performance (or lack thereof)
Due to the craziness in the previous blog, I decided to post an actual graph showing a NetApp system I/O latency while under load and a disk rebuild. It was a bakeoff vs another large storage vendor (which NetApp won).
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Vendor FUD-slinging: at what point should legal action be taken? And who do you believe as a customer?
I’m all for a good fight, but in the storage industry it seems that all too many creative liberties are taken when competing.
Let’s assume, for a moment, that we’re talking about the car industry instead. I like cars, and I love car analogies. So we’ll use that, and it illustrates the absurdity really well.
Pillar claiming their RAID5 is more reliable than RAID6? Wizardry or fiction?
Competing against Pillar at an account. One of the things they said: That their RAID5 is superior in reliability to RAID6. I wanted to put this on the public domain and, if true, invite Pillar engineers to comment here and explain how it works for all to see. If untrue, again I invite the Pillar engineers to comment and explain why it’s untrue.
Continue reading “Pillar claiming their RAID5 is more reliable than RAID6? Wizardry or fiction?”
What if you could dramatically improve your application testing times? What would happen to your productivity and to the company’s bottom line?
So, let’s say the DBA (or insert some other discipline) wants to do some testing for a new product (known to happen occasionally) – and the way he would really like to test is to create 20 test cases, which requires 20 copies of the main database. He would then automate the test and therefore get results very quickly.
Should techies or business owners decide on technology (or both)?
It’s no secret that, in most companies, the technology folks are primarily the ones deciding on which new technologies to adopt – after all, they are the ones that understand the technology, right? Business owners explain the business problem to the technologists, and the techies take it from there – and ultimately present 2-3 different solutions that will work and the business picks the cheapest (and/or the vendor that employs the rep that provides the most golf outings).
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Is EMC under-sizing RecoverPoint and Avamar deals to win business?
It’s been a while since I wrote anything – unlike some, I actually have a day job and don’t use ghostwriters! Well, at least that’s my excuse.
My admiration for RecoverPoint is well known (see older post, which is referenced internally within EMC as a great pro-RecoverPoint article). It really is a good product and, next to VMware, my favorite EMC acquisition.
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Should your backups to disk consume more disk than you use for production? Seriously?
So, let’s talk about this not-so-hypothetical customer… They have:
- A few sites
- A lot of data per site
- Much of the data is DBs and Multimedia
- No replication currently
- Can’t back up everything currently
- No proper DR
- Fairly significant rate of change
- Not the fastest pipes between sites
They asked me to propose a solution that will back everything up and cross-replicate the backups between the sites. They want to move as far away from tape as possible.
Ease Of Use, Backup and Recovery And Efficiency in Modern Disk Arrays – What Questions Should You Really Be Asking the Vendors?
It’s interesting how many storage vendors claim their products are easy to use and, indeed, show nice canned demos full of wizards and elves and whatnot that seem to impress most. There are also grandiose claims of magically reliable hardware and other pixie dust. Ultimately, the reality is that:
New ext4 vs XFS benchmarks using Fedora 11 Leonidas
What a difference a kernel rev and/or distribution make. If you recall from a previous post, I was unable to complete postmark testing on Ubuntu 9.04 using ext4, and had to recommend against ext4. Now, with the release of Fedora 11 “Leonidas”, a new kernel seems to make a big difference in performance and stability of ext4.
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About the Data Domain acquisition – and is EMC really the best place for Data Domain?
Much has already been written about this imminent acquisition of Data Domain by either NetApp or EMC and, since opinions are like you-know-what, and I have one, here it is… if I ramble, forgive me. I have too much to say and I’m trying to be PC… I wrote and subsequently erased all kinds of stuff that could probably get me in trouble (the more you work with a company the more dirt you uncover, and I have several earth movers’ worth).
Linux filesystem benchmark extravaganza – including Deadline vs CFQ schedulers and ext4 instability
I have some spare time these days so I figured I’d finally test as many filesystems on Linux as I could…
The new ext4 is an option with modern kernels so I loaded Ubuntu 9.04 and tried postmark and bonnie++ on the same partition using various filesystems and switching between the CFQ and Deadline schedulers.