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A look at EMC’s FASTv2, FAST Cache and FLARE30 – EMC giveth, EMC taketh away

[Update: some grammar mistakes fixed and a few questions added]

Before anyone starts frothing at the mouth, notice that in the categories this post is part of FUD 🙂 Always do your own analysis… I just wanted to give people some food for thought, like I did when FASTv1 came out. I didn’t make this up, it’s all based on various EMC documents available online. I advise people looking at this technology to ask for extensive documentation regarding best practices before taking the leap.

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NetApp benefits for virtualization – benchmarked and proven

My colleague Vaughn Stewart explains it in detail here. I didn’t feel we gave this the publicity it deserves.

In a nutshell: We have numbers (published only after VMware engineering themselves approved the paper as accurate and gave their permission) proving that, compared to traditional arrays, running virtualized workloads on NetApp gear needs less resources while providing excellent performance.

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FUD tales from the blogosphere: when vendors attack (and a wee bit on expanding and balancing RAID groups)

Haven’t blogged in a while, way too busy. Against my better judgment, I thought I’d respond to some comments I’ve seen on the blogosphere, adding one of my trademark extremely long titles. Part response, part tutorial. People with no time to read it all: Skip to the end and see if you know the answer to the question or if you have ideas on how to do such a thing.

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Et tu, Brute? EMC offering capacity guarantees? The sky is falling! Will Chuck resign?

It came to my attention that EMC is offering a 20% efficiency guarantee vs the competition (they seem to be focusing on NetApp as usual but that’s besides the point in this post). See here.

Now, I won’t go ahead and attack their guarantee. Good luck with that, more power to you etc etc. They need all the competitive edge they can get.

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NetApp usable space – beyond the FUD

I come across all kinds of FUD, and some of the most ridiculous claims against NetApp regard usable space. I won’t post screenshots from competitive docs since who knows who’ll complain, but suffice it to say that one of the usual strategies against NetApp is to claim the system has something like well under 50% space efficiency using a variety of calculations, anecdotes and obsolete information. In one case, 34% usable space 🙂 Right…

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