Musings on storage, tuning, backups and more – delivered with a no-nonsense approach. By Dimitris Krekoukias
Before we begin, something needs to be clear: Although dual-ported NVMe drives are not yet cost effective, the architecture of Nimble Storage is NVMe-ready today. And always remember that in order to get good benefits from NVMe, one needs to implement it all the way from the client. Doing NVMe only at the array isn’t as effective.
Continue reading “Practical Considerations for Implementing NVMe Storage”
Before we begin: This is another vendor-neutral post. I realize there may be no architecture that can do everything I’m proposing, but some may come closer to what you need than others. Whether you’re a vendor or a customer, see it as stuff you should be doing or be asking for respectively…
Continue reading “The Importance of Automated Headroom Management”
This topic is very near and dear to me, and is one of the big reasons I came over to Nimble Storage.
I’ve always believed that storage systems should behave gracefully and predictably under pressure. Automatically. Even under complex and difficult situations.
It sounds like a simple request and it makes a whole lot of sense, but very few storage systems out there actually behave this way. This creates business challenges and increases risk and OpEx.
Continue reading “The Well-Behaved Storage System: Automatic Noisy Neighbor Avoidance”
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: