Tag: RAID

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How to Successfully Navigate Storage Vendor Capacity Guarantees

beancounter

I want to arm you with the knowledge needed to properly navigate storage efficiency guarantee contracts and arrive at a safe system sizing, with reasonable assumptions.

This is another of my generic, vendor-neutral posts aimed at helping the audience be aware of certain important things that I often see overlooked.

How does one navigate the small print around storage data reduction guarantees? What are you entitled to if the vendor misses the mark? And how do you minimize your risk when faced with certain sales teams that are determined to win even if it means huge customer risk?

Do you know your data makeup? And how it may affect a capacity guarantee? But, more importantly, how it will affect your overall efficiency?

Let’s start with a nice reductio ad absurdum example to illustrate what I mean.

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Modern RAID Must Protect Against Multiple Temporally Correlated Errors

Modern data protection needs to adapt to protecting modern media. RAID is no exception. In this article I will explain why modern storage consumers need to be asking for certain kinds of protection and not settling for less.

To summarize, don’t bother with storage that can’t provide at least dual parity protection for any given piece of data (whether that’s an array, HCI or the cloud, it doesn’t matter).

Why? Two big reasons:

  1. Because media these days is both larger and fails differently than in the past. Which means Temporally Correlated Errors are far more likely to happen, so you need protection against those. It’s not doom-mongering. It’s based on data.
  2. In the olden days, arrays had small RAID groups that each held a handful of volumes. If something was damaged in a RAID group, at most you’d just lose that handful of volumes. Modern arrays use pools of space, typically made up of multiple RAID groups. This means that you can potentially damage all volumes in an array merely by losing data integrity in a single RAID group in the pool. I’m sure you aren’t exactly looking forward to experiencing that.

I will take you step by step through this, as is my idiom. It is though rather sad that I have to write this kind of thing in 2020…

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How to decipher EMC’s new VNX pre-announcement and look behind the marketing.

It was with interest that I watched some of EMC’s announcements during EMC World. Partly due to competitor awareness, and partly due to being an irrepressible nerd, hoping for something really cool.

BTW: Thanks to Mark Kulacz for assisting with the proof points. Mark, as much as it pains me to admit so, is quite possibly an even bigger nerd than I am.

So… EMC did deliver something. A demo of the possible successor to VNX (VNX2?), unavailable as of this writing (indeed, a lot of fuss was made about it being lab only etc).

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More EMC VNX caveats

Lately, when competing with VNX, I see EMC using several points to prove they’re superior (or at least not deficient).

I’d already written this article a while back, and today I want to explore a few aspects in more depth since my BS pain threshold is getting pretty low. The topics discussed:

  1. VNX space efficiency
  2. LUNs can be served by either controller for “load balancing”
  3. Claims that autotiering helps most workloads
  4. Claims that storage pools are easier
  5. Thin provisioning performance (this one’s interesting)
  6. The new VNX snapshots

References to actual EMC documentation will be used. Otherwise I’d also be no better than a marketing droid.

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Are you doing a disservice to your company with RFPs?

Whether we like it or not, RFPs (Request For Proposal) are a fact of life for vendors.

It usually works like this: A customer has a legitimate need for something. They decide (for whatever reason) to get bids from different vendors. They then craft an RFP document that is either:

  1. Carefully written, with the best intentions, so that they get the most detailed proposal possible given their requirements, or
  2. Carefully tailored by them and the help of their preferred vendor to box out the other vendors.

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