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”