Musings on storage, tuning, backups and more – delivered with a no-nonsense approach. By Dimitris Krekoukias
I am proud to announce that, as of today, I am a member of the Nimble Storage team.
This marks the end of an era – I spent quite a bit of time at NetApp: learned a lot, did a lot – by the end I had my hands in all kinds of sausage making… 🙂
I wish my friends at NetApp the best of luck for the future. The storage industry is a very tough arena, and one that will be increasingly harder and with less tolerance than ever before.
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.
Continue reading “NetApp E-Series posts top ten price performance SPC-2 result”
June 23rd marked the release of new NetApp Enterprise Flash technology. The release consists of:
It’s been a while since our last SPC-1 benchmark submission with high-end systems in 2012. Since then we launched all new systems, and went from ONTAP 8.1 to ONTAP 8.3, big jumps in both hardware and software.
In 2012 we posted an SPC-1 result with a 6-node FAS6240 cluster – not our biggest system at the time but we felt it was more representative of a realistic solution and used a hybrid configuration (spinning disks boosted by flash caching technology). It still got the best overall balance of low latency (Average Response Time or ART in SPC-1 parlance, to be used from now on), high SPC-1 IOPS, price, scalability, data resiliency and functionality compared to all other spinning disk systems at the time.
Today (April 22, 2015) we published SPC-1 results with an 8-node all-flash high-end FAS8080 cluster to illustrate the performance of the largest current NetApp FAS systems in this industry-standard benchmark.
(edit: fixed the images)
After a long hiatus, we return to our regularly scheduled programming with a 2-part series that will address some wild claims Oracle has been making recently.
I’m pleased to introduce Jeffrey Steiner, ex-Oracle employee and all-around DB performance wizard. He helps some of our largest customers with designing high performance solutions for Oracle DBs:
Continue reading “When competitors try too hard and miss the point”
It was with interest that I watched the launch of EMC’s VNX refresh. The updated boxes got some long-awaited features, EMC talked a lot about how some pretty severe single-threaded bottlenecks were removed, more CPU and memory was put in, and there was much rejoicing.
Not really trying to pick on the new boxes (that will be in a future post, relax :)), but what I thought was interesting was that the code that makes most of the new features a possibility cannot be loaded on current-gen VNX boxes (not even the biggest, the 7500, which has plenty of CPU and RAM juice even compared to the next gen boxes).
Software-defined storage indeed.
This is going to be a short post, to atone for my past sins of overly long posts but mostly because I want to eat dinner.
On storage systems with spinning disks, a favorite method for getting more performance is short-stroking the disk.
It’s a weird term but firmly based on science. Some storage vendors even made a big deal about being able to place data on certain parts of the disk, geometrically speaking.
(Edited: My bad, it was 2TB/s, up from 1.3TB/s, the solution has been getting bigger and upgraded, plus the post talks about the E5400, the newer E5600 is much faster).
What do you do when you need so much I/O performance that no one single storage system can deliver it, no matter how large?
Continue reading “NetApp delivers 2TB/s performance to giant supercomputer for big data”
Just as NetApp dominated the older version of the SPEC SFS97_R1 NFS benchmark back in May of 2006 (and was unsurpassed in that benchmark with 1 million SFS operations per second), the time has come to once again dominate the current version, SPEC SFS2008 NFS.
Recently we have been focusing on benchmarking realistic configurations that people might actually put in their datacenters, instead of lab queens with unusable configs focused on achieving the highest result regardless of cost.
Continue reading “NetApp posts world-record SPEC SFS2008 NFS benchmark result”
Most are familiar with Hanlon’s Razor:
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
A variation of that is:
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity, but don’t rule out malice.
Continue reading “NetApp vs EMC usability report: malice, stupidity or both?”
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”
It seems that everyone and their granny is trying to create some sort of stack offering these days. Look at all the brouhaha – HP buying 3Par, Dell buying Compellent, all kinds of partnerships being formed left and right. Stacks are hot.
To the uninitiated, a stack is what you can get when a vendor is able to offer multiple products under a single umbrella. For instance, being able to get servers, an OS, a DB, an email system, storage and network switches from a single manufacturer (not a VAR) is an example of a single-sourced stack.