Musings on storage, tuning, backups and more – delivered with a no-nonsense approach. By Dimitris Krekoukias
I wanted to bring this crucial issue to light since I’m noticing several storage vendors being either cavalier about this or simply unaware.
I will explain why solutions that don’t offer some sort of automated, live SSD firmware update mechanism are potentially extremely risky propositions. Yes, this is another “vendor hat off, common sense hat on” type of post.
Continue reading “The Importance of SSD (and other) Firmware Updates”
Recently, many vendors announced the availability of large SSDs. It’s not extremely exciting – it’s just a larger storage medium. Sure, it’s really advanced 3D NAND, it’s fast and ultra-reliable, and will allow some nicely dense configurations at a reduced $/GB. Another day in Enterprise Storage Land.
But, ultimately, that’s how drives roll – they get bigger. And in the case of SSD, the roadmaps seem extremely aggressive regarding capacities, with 100TB per device coming.
Then I realized that several vendors don’t have large SSD capacities available.
But why? Why ignore such a seemingly easy and hugely cost-effective way to increase density?
In this post I will attempt to explain why certain architectural decisions may lead to inflexible design constructs that can have long-term flexibility and scalability ramifications.
Continue reading “Architecture has long term scalability implications for All Flash Appliances”
June 23rd marked the release of new NetApp Enterprise Flash technology. The release consists of:
In this post I will try to help you understand how to objectively calculate the cost of space-efficient storage solutions – there’s just too much misinformation out there and it’s getting irritating since certain vendors aren’t exactly honest with how they do certain calculations…
Continue reading “Calculating the true cost of space efficient Flash solutions”
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.
I’m seeing some really “out there” marketing lately, every vendor (including us) trying to find an angle that sounds exciting while not being an outright lie (most of the time).
A competitor recently claimed an industry first of up to 1.7 million (undefined type) IOPS in a single rack.
The number (which admittedly sounds solid), got me thinking. Was the “industry first” that nobody else did up to 1.7 million IOPS in a single rack?
Continue reading “Marketing fun: NetApp industry first of up to 13 million IOPS in a single rack”
<edit: updated with the changes in the SPC-1 price/performance lineup as of 3/27/2015, fixed some typos>
I’m happy to announce that today we announced the new, third-gen EF560 all-flash array, and also posted SPC-1 results showing the impressive performance it is capable of in this extremely difficult benchmark.
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).
Continue reading “How to decipher EMC’s new VNX pre-announcement and look behind the marketing.”
Recently, interesting research (see here) from researchers at Ohio State was presented at USENIX.
To summarize, they tested 15 SSDs, several of them “Enterprise” grade, and subjected them to various power fault conditions.
I really resisted using the “flash in the pan” phrase in the title… first, because the term is overused and second, because I don’t believe solid state is of limited value. On the contrary.
However, I am noticing an interesting trend among some newcomers in the array business, desperate to find a flash niche to compete in:
Writing their storage OS around very specific NAND flash technologies. Almost as bad as writing an entire storage OS to support a single hypervisor technology, but that’s a story for another day.
Continue reading “Are some flash storage vendors optimizing too heavily for short-lived NAND flash?”
I finally decided to spring for a SSD for my laptop since I hammer it heavily with a lot of mostly random I/O. It was money well spent.
I went for an Intel 320 model, since it includes extra capacitors for flushing the cache in the event of power failure, and has RAID-4 onboard for protection beyond sparing (there are other, faster SSDs but I need the reliability and can’t afford large-sized SLC).
Continue reading “OS X and SSD – tunings plus performance with and without TRIM”
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”