Musings on storage, tuning, backups and more – delivered with a no-nonsense approach. By Dimitris Krekoukias
This is going to be a short post, to atone for my past sins of overly long posts but mostly because I want to eat dinner.
On storage systems with spinning disks, a favorite method for getting more performance is short-stroking the disk.
It’s a weird term but firmly based on science. Some storage vendors even made a big deal about being able to place data on certain parts of the disk, geometrically speaking.
<Edited to add some more information on how SPC-1 works since there was some confusion based on the comments received>
We’ve been busy at NetApp… busy perfecting the industry’s only scale-out unified platform, among other things.
We’ve already released ONTAP 8.1, which, in Cluster-Mode, allows 24 nodes (each with up to 8TB cache) for NAS workloads, and 4 nodes for block workloads (FC and iSCSI).
Continue reading “NetApp posts great Cluster-Mode SPC-1 result”
(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”
Just as NetApp dominated the older version of the SPEC SFS97_R1 NFS benchmark back in May of 2006 (and was unsurpassed in that benchmark with 1 million SFS operations per second), the time has come to once again dominate the current version, SPEC SFS2008 NFS.
Recently we have been focusing on benchmarking realistic configurations that people might actually put in their datacenters, instead of lab queens with unusable configs focused on achieving the highest result regardless of cost.
Continue reading “NetApp posts world-record SPEC SFS2008 NFS benchmark result”
<Article updated with more accurate calculation>
There are some impressive new scores at storageperformance.org, with the usual crazy configurations of thousands of drives etc.
When looking at $/IOP, make sure you are comparing list price (look at the full disclosure report, that has all the details for each config).
Otherwise, you could get the wrong $/IOP since some vendors have list prices, others show heavy discounting.
Continue reading “Interpreting $/IOPS and IOPS/RAID correctly for various RAID types”
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?)
I finally decided to spring for a SSD for my laptop since I hammer it heavily with a lot of mostly random I/O. It was money well spent.
I went for an Intel 320 model, since it includes extra capacitors for flushing the cache in the event of power failure, and has RAID-4 onboard for protection beyond sparing (there are other, faster SSDs but I need the reliability and can’t afford large-sized SLC).
Continue reading “OS X and SSD – tunings plus performance with and without TRIM”
Some of the comments in my previous post asked about $/IOPS and $/TB.
Since SPEC doesn’t require prices to be listed, I did my own analysis.
The NetApp numbers are simply 4x the existing 6240 result, which is what EMC did with their submission, they used 4x separate VNX systems and aggregated the result.
Continue reading “Examining value for money regarding the SPEC benchmarks”
A bit of a controversial title, no?
Allow me to elaborate.
EMC posted a new SPEC SFS result as part of a marketing stunt (which is working, look at what I’m doing – I’m talking about them, if only to clear the air).
Continue reading “EMC conclusively proves that VNX bottlenecks NAS performance”
Just came to my attention that EMC is finally joining the SPC (Storage Performance Council). As I’ve pointed in their past, their absence from this most standard industry benchmark was puzzling, kudos for rectifying this omission.
I do have some advice for EMC (and all other vendors that have already posted results):
Continue reading “EMC finally joining the SPC – plus some advice”
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”
The SPC-1(E) benchmark is the standard high-intensity test for block storage, consisting of very stringent rules and a standard test suite.
SPC-1 is one of the worst things you can do to a disk array. The benchmark itself does a lot of writes (about 60%), is highly random and is hostile to most caching systems. Which neatly explains why IBM has all kinds of system submissions but doesn’t show XIV, and the complete absence of another prominent vendor (look at the submissions, you’ll figure it out – the big boys of storage are NetApp, IBM, HDS, HP and one more 🙂 ).
My colleague Vaughn Stewart explains it in detail here. I didn’t feel we gave this the publicity it deserves.
In a nutshell: We have numbers (published only after VMware engineering themselves approved the paper as accurate and gave their permission) proving that, compared to traditional arrays, running virtualized workloads on NetApp gear needs less resources while providing excellent performance.
Continue reading “NetApp benefits for virtualization – benchmarked and proven”
Another one came in. I’ll keep calling the offenders out until the craziness stops. Fellow engineers – remember that, regardless of where we work, our mission should be to help the customer out first and foremost. Then make a sale, if possible/applicable. I implore you to get your priorities straight. If it looks like you’re losing the fight, figure out what your true value is. If you have no true value, you always have the option of bombing the price. But please, don’t sell someone an under-configured system.
Continue reading “More tales from the field: Sizing best practices – does Compellent follow them?”