I’m in MN prepping to teach a course (my signature anti-FUD extravaganza), and thought I’d get a few things off my chest that I’ve been meaning to write about for a while. Some Stravinsky to provide the vibes and I’m good to go. It’s getting really late BTW and I’m sure this will progressively get less coherent as time goes by, but I like to write my posts in one shot.
NetApp disk rebuild impact on performance (or lack thereof)
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).
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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.
New ext4 vs XFS benchmarks using Fedora 11 Leonidas
What a difference a kernel rev and/or distribution make. If you recall from a previous post, I was unable to complete postmark testing on Ubuntu 9.04 using ext4, and had to recommend against ext4. Now, with the release of Fedora 11 “Leonidas”, a new kernel seems to make a big difference in performance and stability of ext4.
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Linux filesystem benchmark extravaganza – including Deadline vs CFQ schedulers and ext4 instability
I have some spare time these days so I figured I’d finally test as many filesystems on Linux as I could…
The new ext4 is an option with modern kernels so I loaded Ubuntu 9.04 and tried postmark and bonnie++ on the same partition using various filesystems and switching between the CFQ and Deadline schedulers.
So what exactly is IBM trying to do with the XIV?
By now most people dealing with storage know that IBM acquired the XIV technology. What IBM is doing now is trying to push the technology to everyone and their dog, for reasons we’ll get into…
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Cinebench benchmarks – performance comparison between Vista 64 and Mac OS X
Been a while since I posted anything – there’s a TON of material but some of us actually do more than blog, it’s quarter/year end, and I barely have time to go to the bathroom…
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Postmark on late 2008 Macbook Pro
So I’m now the proud owner of a tricked-out 2.8GHz MBP.
Naturally I’ve been tinkering with it already (only had it for 2 days). I’ve disabled swapfile encryption, for instance, and I think it makes it have teh snappy.
A word of caution when setting up a deduplicating VTL
Based on some recent experiences I wanted to make people aware of some caveats with setting up a VTL with deduplication. This is specifically regarding the EMC DL3D (AKA Quantum DXi) but applies to all of them. This will be a mercifully short and to the point post. Here’s the rub:
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Massive benchmark comparison between Windows XP, Vista and 2008 Server, 32- and 64-bit
Found this while surfing and couldn’t resist posting the link. This guy did a massive array of tests on pretty much all versions of Windows that matter at the moment. The short version? If it’s performance you’re after, there’s no clear winner, since they all have their strengths. Overall, of the currently-supported OSes 2008 server seems to have the edge, as indicated by my own experiences. Attaching the results below, but here’s a link, too.
Virtualized Windows I/O performance on Xen with and without the optimized PV drivers, and versus the Linux host
One of my readers, Randall Ehren, was kind enough to provide benchmarks for Xen-virtualized Windows 2003 and XP with and without the optimized PV driver, and also compare to the underlying host. Most of the text below is copied verbatim from his correspondence with me, I just added some clarification in places.
Finally, some postmark results for OSX! And how does it do versus Windows?
My colleague Ian (last name withheld to save him from the Mac zealots) compiled the postmark code on his beloved Mac and ran it with the same settings I use in general (see older blog posts, just search for postmark).
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Lowest-impact antivirus tool I’ve ever tried
I’ve been trying out ESET’s NOD32 on my 64-bit 2008 Server box. Before that I’d tried Avast! – which has great detection but noticeably slows down my computer, even when it’s loading pre-cached and pre-checked content (easy test: load Firefox with and without Avast! several times. It’s ALWAYS much slower to load with antivirus on than without. Without Avast! it loads instantly).
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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.
NetApp posts SPC-1 results
NetApp posted some SPC results showing their 3040 box performing pretty well in SPC-1 relative to an EMC box.
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