Musings on storage, tuning, backups and more – delivered with a no-nonsense approach. By Dimitris Krekoukias
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”