Musings on storage, tuning, backups and more – delivered with a no-nonsense approach. By Dimitris Krekoukias
NetApp published a Top Ten Price/Performance SPC-2 result for the E5660 platform (the all-SSD EF560 variant of the platform also comfortably placed in the Top Ten Price/Performance for the SPC-1 test). In this post I will explain why the E-Series platform is an ideal choice for workloads requiring high performance density while being cost effective.
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Recently, many vendors announced the availability of large SSDs. It’s not extremely exciting – it’s just a larger storage medium. Sure, it’s really advanced 3D NAND, it’s fast and ultra-reliable, and will allow some nicely dense configurations at a reduced $/GB. Another day in Enterprise Storage Land.
But, ultimately, that’s how drives roll – they get bigger. And in the case of SSD, the roadmaps seem extremely aggressive regarding capacities, with 100TB per device coming.
Then I realized that several vendors don’t have large SSD capacities available.
But why? Why ignore such a seemingly easy and hugely cost-effective way to increase density?
In this post I will attempt to explain why certain architectural decisions may lead to inflexible design constructs that can have long-term flexibility and scalability ramifications.
Continue reading “Architecture has long term scalability implications for All Flash Appliances”
The idea for this article came from seeing various people attempt product testing. Though I thought about storage when writing this, the ideas apply to most industries.
There are really three different kinds of testing.
The first is the incomplete, improper, useless in almost any situation testing. Typically done by people that have little training on the subject. Almost always ends in misleading results and is arguably dangerous, especially if used to make purchasing decisions.
The second is what’s affectionately and romantically called “Real World Testing”. Typically done by people that will try to simulate some kind of workload they believe they encounter in their environment, or use part of their environment to do the testing. Much more accurate than the first kind, if done right. Usually the workload is decided arbitrarily 🙂
The third and last kind is what I term “Proper Testing”. This is done by professionals (that usually do this type of testing for a living) that understand how complex testing for a broad range of conditions needs to be done. It’s really hard to do, but pays amazing dividends if done thoroughly.
Let’s go over the three kinds in more details, with some examples.
June 23rd marked the release of new NetApp Enterprise Flash technology. The release consists of:
In this post I will try to help you understand how to objectively calculate the cost of space-efficient storage solutions – there’s just too much misinformation out there and it’s getting irritating since certain vendors aren’t exactly honest with how they do certain calculations…
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