I’m in MN prepping to teach a course (my signature anti-FUD extravaganza), and thought I’d get a few things off my chest that I’ve been meaning to write about for a while. Some Stravinsky to provide the vibes and I’m good to go. It’s getting really late BTW and I’m sure this will progressively get less coherent as time goes by, but I like to write my posts in one shot.
Protecting your existing legacy storage investment with virtualization “do’s and don’ts”
It’s an undeniable fact that many customers, while they would love to use the highly advanced features of modern disk arrays, have already made a big investment in legacy storage. Sure, it doesn’t have all the great features, but it’s already there, frequently there’s a lot of it, and the maintenance isn’t expiring for another year or two so it’s not economically feasible to get rid of it.
So, are there any independent bloggers? Really?
There was some weird backlash against my site and my person recently – see here and here and in the comments here. Chuck Hollis got all uppity about whether I work at NetApp (with, for) or not.
I find it interesting that this only came up when I wrote something pro-NetApp. Wasn’t even anti-EMC.
Continue reading “So, are there any independent bloggers? Really?”
More FUD busting: Deduplication – is variable-block better than fixed-block, and should you care?
Before all the variable-block aficionados go up in arms, I freely admit variable-block deduplication may overall squeeze more dedupe out of your data.
I won’t go into a laborious explanation of variable vs fixed, but, in a nutshell, fixed-block deduplication means that data is split into equal chunks, each chunk given a signature, compared to a DB and the common chunks are not stored.
NetApp disk rebuild impact on performance (or lack thereof)
Due to the craziness in the previous blog, I decided to post an actual graph showing a NetApp system I/O latency while under load and a disk rebuild. It was a bakeoff vs another large storage vendor (which NetApp won).
Continue reading “NetApp disk rebuild impact on performance (or lack thereof)”