Musings on storage, tuning, backups and more – delivered with a no-nonsense approach. By Dimitris Krekoukias
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.
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)”
I’m all for a good fight, but in the storage industry it seems that all too many creative liberties are taken when competing.
Let’s assume, for a moment, that we’re talking about the car industry instead. I like cars, and I love car analogies. So we’ll use that, and it illustrates the absurdity really well.
Competing against Pillar at an account. One of the things they said: That their RAID5 is superior in reliability to RAID6. I wanted to put this on the public domain and, if true, invite Pillar engineers to comment here and explain how it works for all to see. If untrue, again I invite the Pillar engineers to comment and explain why it’s untrue.
Continue reading “Pillar claiming their RAID5 is more reliable than RAID6? Wizardry or fiction?”
So, let’s say the DBA (or insert some other discipline) wants to do some testing for a new product (known to happen occasionally) – and the way he would really like to test is to create 20 test cases, which requires 20 copies of the main database. He would then automate the test and therefore get results very quickly.