Tag: PowerStore

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New NetApp SPC-1 submission – more IOPS per drive than any other vendor, and a bit on write caching

The SPC-1(E) benchmark is the standard high-intensity test for block storage, consisting of very stringent rules and a standard test suite.

SPC-1 is one of the worst things you can do to a disk array. The benchmark itself does a lot of writes (about 60%), is highly random and is hostile to most caching systems. Which neatly explains why IBM has all kinds of system submissions but doesn’t show XIV, and the complete absence of another prominent vendor (look at the submissions, you’ll figure it out – the big boys of storage are NetApp, IBM, HDS, HP and one more 🙂 ).

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Has NetApp sold more flash than any other enterprise disk vendor?

NetApp has been selling our custom cache boards with flash chips for a while now. We have sold over 3PB of usable cache this way.

The question was raised in public forums such as Twitter – someone mentioned that this figure may be more usable Solid State storage than all other enterprise disk vendors have sold combined (whether it’s used for caching or normal storage – I know we have greatly outsold anyone else that does it for caching alone 🙂 ).

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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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