Musings on storage, tuning, backups and more – delivered with a no-nonsense approach. By Dimitris Krekoukias
It’s that time of the year again. The usual websites are busy with news of the upcoming EMC midrange refresh called VNX. And records being broken.
(NEWSFLASH: Watching the webcast now, the record they kept saying they would break ended up being some guy jumping over a bunch of EMC arrays with a motorcycle – and here I was hoping to see some kind of performance record…)
Continue reading “Questions to ask EMC regarding their new VNX systems…”
This is going to be a mercifully short entry. I’m saving the big one for another day 🙂
One of the features of NetApp storage is that by using Converged Network Adapters (CNAs) one can use a single wire and transport over that FC, iSCSI, NFS and CIFS, at the same time.
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 🙂 ).
NetApp has been selling our custom cache boards with flash chips for a while now. We have sold over 3PB of usable cache this way.
The question was raised in public forums such as Twitter – someone mentioned that this figure may be more usable Solid State storage than all other enterprise disk vendors have sold combined (whether it’s used for caching or normal storage – I know we have greatly outsold anyone else that does it for caching alone 🙂 ).
Continue reading “Has NetApp sold more flash than any other enterprise disk vendor?”