Category: New Technologies

Posted on

How to decipher EMC’s new VNX pre-announcement and look behind the marketing.

It was with interest that I watched some of EMC’s announcements during EMC World. Partly due to competitor awareness, and partly due to being an irrepressible nerd, hoping for something really cool.

BTW: Thanks to Mark Kulacz for assisting with the proof points. Mark, as much as it pains me to admit so, is quite possibly an even bigger nerd than I am.

So… EMC did deliver something. A demo of the possible successor to VNX (VNX2?), unavailable as of this writing (indeed, a lot of fuss was made about it being lab only etc).

Continue reading “How to decipher EMC’s new VNX pre-announcement and look behind the marketing.”

Posted on

Are some flash storage vendors optimizing too heavily for short-lived NAND flash?

I really resisted using the “flash in the pan” phrase in the title… first, because the term is overused and second, because I don’t believe solid state is of limited value. On the contrary.

However, I am noticing an interesting trend among some newcomers in the array business, desperate to find a flash niche to compete in:

Writing their storage OS around very specific NAND flash technologies. Almost as bad as writing an entire storage OS to support a single hypervisor technology, but that’s a story for another day.

Continue reading “Are some flash storage vendors optimizing too heavily for short-lived NAND flash?”

Posted on

Buyer beware: is your storage vendor sizing properly for performance, or are they under-sizing technologies like Megacaching and Autotiering?

With the advent of performance-altering technologies (notice the word choice), storage sizing is just not what it used to be.

I’m writing this post because more and more I see some vendors not using scientific methods to size their solution, instead aiming to reach a price point, hoping the technology will work to achieve the requisite performance (and if it doesn’t, it’s sold anyway, either they can give some free gear to make the problem go away, or the customer can always buy more, right?)

Continue reading “Buyer beware: is your storage vendor sizing properly for performance, or are they under-sizing technologies like Megacaching and Autotiering?”

Posted on

Stack Wars: The Clone Wars

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.

Continue reading “Stack Wars: The Clone Wars”

Posted on

Single wire and single OS: yet another way to tell true unified storage from the rest

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.

Continue reading “Single wire and single OS: yet another way to tell true unified storage from the rest”

Posted on

NetApp posts new SPEC SFS NFS results – far faster than V-Max with Celerra VG8

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”

Posted on

A look at EMC’s FASTv2, FAST Cache and FLARE30 – EMC giveth, EMC taketh away

[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”

Posted on

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?”

Posted on

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.

Continue reading “What if you could dramatically improve your application testing times? What would happen to your productivity and to the company’s bottom line?”

Posted on

The true XIV fail condition finally revealed (?)

I just got this information:

For XIV to be in jeopardy you need to lose 1 drive from one of the host-facing ingest nodes AND 1 drive from the normal data nodes within a few minutes (so there’s no time to rebuild) while writing to the thing.

Have no way of confirming this but it did come from a reliable source.

A customer recently tried pulling random drives and XIV didn’t shut down and was working fine, but they were from the data nodes.

Why can’t anyone post something concrete here? I’m sure IBM won’t post since the confusion serves them well.

For what it’s worth, the customer is really happy with the simplicity of the XIV GUI.

D

Posted on

What is the value of your data? Do you have the money to implement proper DR that works? How are you deciding what kind of storage and DR strategy you’ll follow? And how does Continuous Data Protection like EMC’s RecoverPoint help?

Maybe the longest title for a post ever. And one of my longest, most rambling posts ever, it seems.

Recently we did a demo for a customer that I thought opened an interesting can of worms. Let’s set the stage – and, BTW, let it be known that I lost my train of thought multiple times writing this over multiple days so it may seem a bit incoherent (unusually, it wasn’t written in one shot).

Continue reading “What is the value of your data? Do you have the money to implement proper DR that works? How are you deciding what kind of storage and DR strategy you’ll follow? And how does Continuous Data Protection like EMC’s RecoverPoint help?”

Posted on

Windows Server 2008 RTM 64-bit performance versus Vista SP1 64-bit, and using 2008 as a workstation

I’ve been using Vista x64 for a while now, just so I can make use of all the memory on my machine (an über-thinkpad), and because I like shiny new things and 64-bitness and don’t want to be one-upped by smug Mac users with their feline-named OSes, mock turtlenecks and their newfound 64-bit capabilities. Of course, with the good comes some bad – Vista, while in my opinion a step forward in many ways, does take a step backward when it comes to some areas of performance and sheer resource requirements. A lot of it can be attributed to poorly-written drivers, especially any Aero GUI slowdowns with nVidia cards.

Continue reading “Windows Server 2008 RTM 64-bit performance versus Vista SP1 64-bit, and using 2008 as a workstation”

Posted on

(Very) Preliminary Windows Server 2008 impressions and Vista Multimedia Performance under battery power

Out of curiosity, I very briefly tried the new Server 2008 Release Candidate (freely available from Microsoft). I’ve been using Vista 64-bit since I need to see all the memory in my machine and, while it works mostly OK, there are some low-level scheduling issues with it – for instance, sound is really choppy on battery power, no matter what I do with the power settings, so I can’t use the thing to watch a DVD or listen to music on the plane. Many others seem to be having the same issues, despite the funky Multimedia Class Scheduler nonsense that Microsoft put in the OS that makes networking slower (great info here), even though older incarnations were not suffering from media playback issues under load. And no, if I disable the Multimedia Scheduler it does NOT work better, it actually gets worse, which means that the service is there to fix some other kludge-y issue Microsoft introduced with the scheduler or something like excessive power throttling of certain devices.

Continue reading “(Very) Preliminary Windows Server 2008 impressions and Vista Multimedia Performance under battery power”