Category: FUD

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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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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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7-Mode to Clustered ONTAP Transition

I normally deal with different aspects of storage (arguably far more exciting) but I thought I would write something to provide some common sense perspective on the current state of 7-Mode to cDOT adoption.

I will tackle the following topics:

  1. cDOT vs 7-Mode capabilities
  2. Claims that not enough customers are moving to cDOT
  3. 7-Mode to cDOT transition is seen by some as difficult and expensive
  4. Some argue it might make sense to look at competitors and move to those instead
  5. What programs and tools are offered by NetApp to make transition easy and quick
  6. Migrating from competitors to cDOT

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When competitors try too hard and miss the point – part two

This will be another FUD-busting post in the two-part series (first part here).

It’s interesting how some competitors, in their quest to beat us at any cost, set aside all common sense.

Recently, an Oracle blogger attempted to understand a document NetApp originally wrote in the 90’s (and which we haven’t really updated since, which is admittedly our bad) that explains how WAFL, the block layout engine of Data ONTAP (the storage OS on the FAS platform) works at a high level.

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When competitors try too hard and miss the point

(edit: fixed the images)

After a long hiatus, we return to our regularly scheduled programming with a 2-part series that will address some wild claims Oracle has been making recently.

I’m pleased to introduce Jeffrey Steiner, ex-Oracle employee and all-around DB performance wizard. He helps some of our largest customers with designing high performance solutions for Oracle DBs:

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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.

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An explanation of IOPS and latency

<I understand this extremely long post is redundant for seasoned storage performance pros – however, these subjects come up so frequently, that I felt compelled to write something. Plus, even the seasoned pros don’t seem to get it sometimes… 🙂 >

IOPS: Possibly the most common measure of storage system performance.

IOPS means Input/Output (operations) Per Second. Seems straightforward. A measure of work vs time (not the same as MB/s, which is actually easier to understand – simply, MegaBytes per Second).

How many of you have seen storage vendors extolling the virtues of their storage by using large IOPS numbers to illustrate a performance advantage?

How many of you decide on storage purchases and base your decisions on those numbers?

However: how many times has a vendor actually specified what they mean when they utter “IOPS”? 🙂

For the impatient, I’ll say this: IOPS numbers by themselves are meaningless and should be treated as such. Without additional metrics such as RAID type, randomness, latency, read vs write % and I/O size (to name a few), an IOPS number is useless.

And now, let’s elaborate… (and, as a refresher regarding the perils of ignoring such things when it comes to sizing, you can always go back here).

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Questions to ask EMC regarding their new VNX systems…

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…)

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FUD tales from the blogosphere: when vendors attack (and a wee bit on expanding and balancing RAID groups)

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.

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Et tu, Brute? EMC offering capacity guarantees? The sky is falling! Will Chuck resign?

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.

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NetApp usable space – beyond the FUD

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…

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FUD and The Invention of Lying

I watched “The Invention of Lying” 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”

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