Category: Performance

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More EMC VNX caveats

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:

  1. VNX space efficiency
  2. LUNs can be served by either controller for “load balancing”
  3. Claims that autotiering helps most workloads
  4. Claims that storage pools are easier
  5. Thin provisioning performance (this one’s interesting)
  6. The new VNX snapshots

References to actual EMC documentation will be used. Otherwise I’d also be no better than a marketing droid.

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Beware of benchmarking storage that does inline compression

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>

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Filesystem and OS benchmark extravaganza: Software makes a huge difference

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:

Software is what makes hardware sing. 

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.

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So now it is OK to sell systems using “Raw IOPS”???

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.

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An explanation of IOPS and latency

<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).

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