Musings on storage, tuning, backups and more – delivered with a no-nonsense approach. By Dimitris Krekoukias
General category for posts
I am proud to announce that, as of today, I am a member of the Nimble Storage team.
This marks the end of an era – I spent quite a bit of time at NetApp: learned a lot, did a lot – by the end I had my hands in all kinds of sausage making… 🙂
I wish my friends at NetApp the best of luck for the future. The storage industry is a very tough arena, and one that will be increasingly harder and with less tolerance than ever before.
Whether we like it or not, RFPs (Request For Proposal) are a fact of life for vendors.
It usually works like this: A customer has a legitimate need for something. They decide (for whatever reason) to get bids from different vendors. They then craft an RFP document that is either:
Continue reading “Are you doing a disservice to your company with RFPs?”
(Edited: My bad, it was 2TB/s, up from 1.3TB/s, the solution has been getting bigger and upgraded, plus the post talks about the E5400, the newer E5600 is much faster).
What do you do when you need so much I/O performance that no one single storage system can deliver it, no matter how large?
Continue reading “NetApp delivers 2TB/s performance to giant supercomputer for big data”
It seems that everyone and their granny is trying to create some sort of stack offering these days. Look at all the brouhaha – HP buying 3Par, Dell buying Compellent, all kinds of partnerships being formed left and right. Stacks are hot.
To the uninitiated, a stack is what you can get when a vendor is able to offer multiple products under a single umbrella. For instance, being able to get servers, an OS, a DB, an email system, storage and network switches from a single manufacturer (not a VAR) is an example of a single-sourced stack.
Sometime last night/this morning a config file in my blog got corrupted. Maybe it got hacked (I was running an ancient WordPress version 2.1) but at any rate the site was down.
Continue reading “Updated blog code, plus a bit about NetApp recovery for cloud providers”
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?”
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).
Continue reading “NetApp disk rebuild impact on performance (or lack thereof)”
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.
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?”
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.
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).
Continue reading “Should techies or business owners decide on technology (or both)?”
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.
Continue reading “Is EMC under-sizing RecoverPoint and Avamar deals to win business?”
So, let’s talk about this not-so-hypothetical customer… They have:
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.
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:
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).