Musings on storage, tuning, backups and more – delivered with a no-nonsense approach. By Dimitris Krekoukias
NetApp published a Top Ten Price/Performance SPC-2 result for the E5660 platform (the all-SSD EF560 variant of the platform also comfortably placed in the Top Ten Price/Performance for the SPC-1 test). In this post I will explain why the E-Series platform is an ideal choice for workloads requiring high performance density while being cost effective.
Continue reading “NetApp E-Series posts top ten price performance SPC-2 result”
Recently, many vendors announced the availability of large SSDs. It’s not extremely exciting – it’s just a larger storage medium. Sure, it’s really advanced 3D NAND, it’s fast and ultra-reliable, and will allow some nicely dense configurations at a reduced $/GB. Another day in Enterprise Storage Land.
But, ultimately, that’s how drives roll – they get bigger. And in the case of SSD, the roadmaps seem extremely aggressive regarding capacities, with 100TB per device coming.
Then I realized that several vendors don’t have large SSD capacities available.
But why? Why ignore such a seemingly easy and hugely cost-effective way to increase density?
In this post I will attempt to explain why certain architectural decisions may lead to inflexible design constructs that can have long-term flexibility and scalability ramifications.
Continue reading “Architecture has long term scalability implications for All Flash Appliances”
The idea for this article came from seeing various people attempt product testing. Though I thought about storage when writing this, the ideas apply to most industries.
There are really three different kinds of testing.
The first is the incomplete, improper, useless in almost any situation testing. Typically done by people that have little training on the subject. Almost always ends in misleading results and is arguably dangerous, especially if used to make purchasing decisions.
The second is what’s affectionately and romantically called “Real World Testing”. Typically done by people that will try to simulate some kind of workload they believe they encounter in their environment, or use part of their environment to do the testing. Much more accurate than the first kind, if done right. Usually the workload is decided arbitrarily 🙂
The third and last kind is what I term “Proper Testing”. This is done by professionals (that usually do this type of testing for a living) that understand how complex testing for a broad range of conditions needs to be done. It’s really hard to do, but pays amazing dividends if done thoroughly.
Let’s go over the three kinds in more details, with some examples.
It’s been a while since our last SPC-1 benchmark submission with high-end systems in 2012. Since then we launched all new systems, and went from ONTAP 8.1 to ONTAP 8.3, big jumps in both hardware and software.
In 2012 we posted an SPC-1 result with a 6-node FAS6240 cluster – not our biggest system at the time but we felt it was more representative of a realistic solution and used a hybrid configuration (spinning disks boosted by flash caching technology). It still got the best overall balance of low latency (Average Response Time or ART in SPC-1 parlance, to be used from now on), high SPC-1 IOPS, price, scalability, data resiliency and functionality compared to all other spinning disk systems at the time.
Today (April 22, 2015) we published SPC-1 results with an 8-node all-flash high-end FAS8080 cluster to illustrate the performance of the largest current NetApp FAS systems in this industry-standard benchmark.
I’m seeing some really “out there” marketing lately, every vendor (including us) trying to find an angle that sounds exciting while not being an outright lie (most of the time).
A competitor recently claimed an industry first of up to 1.7 million (undefined type) IOPS in a single rack.
The number (which admittedly sounds solid), got me thinking. Was the “industry first” that nobody else did up to 1.7 million IOPS in a single rack?
Continue reading “Marketing fun: NetApp industry first of up to 13 million IOPS in a single rack”
<edit: updated with the changes in the SPC-1 price/performance lineup as of 3/27/2015, fixed some typos>
I’m happy to announce that today we announced the new, third-gen EF560 all-flash array, and also posted SPC-1 results showing the impressive performance it is capable of in this extremely difficult benchmark.
Ah, nothing to bring joy to the holidays like a bit of good old-fashioned sales craziness.
Recently we started seeing weird performance “guarantees” by some storage vendors, who seem will try anything for a sale.
Probably by people that haven’t read this.
It goes a bit like this:
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.
Continue reading “When competitors try too hard and miss the point – part two”
(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:
Continue reading “When competitors try too hard and miss the point”
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.”
Lately, when competing with VNX, I see EMC using several points to prove they’re superior (or at least not deficient).
I’d already written this article a while back, and today I want to explore a few aspects in more depth since my BS pain threshold is getting pretty low. The topics discussed:
References to actual EMC documentation will be used. Otherwise I’d also be no better than a marketing droid.
In this post I will examine the effects of benchmarking highly compressible data and why that’s potentially a bad idea.
Compression is not a new storage feature. Of the large storage vendors, at a minimum HPE, NetApp, EMC and IBM can do it (depending on the array). <EDIT (thanks to Matt Davis for reminding me): Some arrays also do zero detection and will not write zeroes to disk – think of it as a specialized form of compression that ONLY works on zeroes>
Continue reading “Beware of benchmarking storage that does inline compression”
I’ve published benchmarks of various OSes and filesystems in the past, but this time I thought I’d try a slightly different approach.
For the regular readers of my articles, I think there is something in here for you. The executive summary is this:
All too frequently I see people looking at various systems and focus on what CPU each box has, how many GHz, cores etc, how much memory. They will try to compare systems by putting the specs on a spreadsheet.
OK – let’s see how well that approach works.
Continue reading “Filesystem and OS benchmark extravaganza: Software makes a huge difference”
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.
Continue reading “So now it is OK to sell systems using “Raw IOPS”???”
<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).