Musings on storage, tuning, backups and more – delivered with a no-nonsense approach. By Dimitris Krekoukias
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.
Continue reading “The Harsh Realities of PCIe Lane Shortage in Storage Systems”
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.
Continue reading “The Loss of Important Knowledge and Acumen Through Perceived Commoditization”
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.
Nimble systems naturally avoid any wasted space when writing. This is an inherent part of the design and not something that was added later.
Continue reading “How Nimble Storage Systems do Block Folding”
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.
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.
Continue reading “InfoSight: How Nimble Customers Benefit from AI and Big Data Predictive Analytics”