Hu’s on first, Tony’s on second, I Don’t Know’s on third

This post started life earlier this year as a post on the death of RAID-5 being signaled by the arrival of 3TB drives. The point being that you can’t afford to be exposed to a second drive failure for 2 or 3 whole days especially given the stress those drives are under during that rebuild [...]

A Small Challenge with NAS Gateways

SAN Volume Controller Late in 2010, Netapp quietly announced they were not planning to support V Series (and by extension IBM N Series NAS Gateways) to be used with any recent version of IBM’s SAN Volume Controller. This was discussed more fully on the Netapp communities forum (you’ll need to create a login) and the reason given [...]

The Joys of OEM Co-op-etition

I was recently mulling over some examples of OEM co-op-etition in our industry: During the early 00′s IBM and Compaq OEM’d each others disk systems, the MA8000 from Compaq (sold as the MSS by IBM) and the ESS from IBM (sold as the CSS by Compaq) to give each other coverage in midrange and high-end [...]

Am I boring you? Full stripe writes and other complexity…

In 1978 IBM employee Norman Ken Ouchi was awarded patent 4092732 for a “System for recovering data stored in failed memory unit.” Technology that would later be known as RAID 5 with full stripe writes. Hands up who’s still doing that or its RAID6 derivative 33 years later? I have a particular distaste for technologies [...]

You can’t always get what you want

There have been a raft of new storage efficiency elements brought to market in the last few years, but what has become obvious is that you can’t yet get it all in one product.

Netapp Insight December 2010

I was invited to Netapp insight 2010 in December and I didn’t get a chance to write much about that at the time being end of year rush and all. So here are some thoughts. IBM N Series and Netapp are essentially the same thing so I will use either term generically. I’m not mentioning presenters [...]

Maximum Fibre Channel Distances

Just a quick hit and run blog post for today… This table authored by Karl Hohenauer just came into my inbox. With the changes in cable quality (OM3, OM4) the supported fibre channel distances have confused a few people, so this will be a good reference doc to remember.

Where Should I Shove This Solid State Drive?

Everyone agrees that enterprise-class SSDs from companies like STEC Inc are fast, and cool, and pretty nice. Most people also realise that SSDs are an order of magnitude more expensive than SAS drives, and that there is no expectation that this will change dramatically within the next 5 years. This means we have to figure out [...]

Storwize V7000 Vs the Rest – a Quick SPC-1 Performance Roundup

This post is in response to the discussion around my recent Easy Tier performance post.

Storwize V7000 Easy Tier: SATA RAID10 Vs SAS RAID6

When IBM released it’s SPC-1 Easy Tier benchmark on DS8000 earlier this year, it was done with SATA RAID10 and SSD RAID10, so when we announced Storwize V7000 with Easy Tier for the midrange, the natural assumption was to pair SATA RAID10 and SSD RAID10 again. But it seems to me that 600GB SAS RAID6 [...]

Exploiting the Intelligence of Inventors

In Tracey Kidder’s book “Soul of a New Machine” I recall Data General’s Tom West as saying that the design that the team at Data General came up with for the MV/8000 minicomputer was so complex that he was worried. He had a friend who had just purchased a first run Digital Equipment Corp VAX, [...]

Does my midrange look big in this?

IDC defines three categories of external disk. The midrange market leaders are EMC, Netapp and IBM (followed by Dell and HP with both slipping slightly over the last 12 months). Netapp is almost entirely a midrange business, while EMC and IBM are the market leaders in highend. Over the last 4 quarters midrange has accounted [...]

A pedant’s rant on “Data Reduction”

I am starting to see the term ‘data reduction’ cropping up all over the place and being used to mean either compression or deduplication. I have a couple of objections to this. It’s not an accurate descriptor It’s bad manners to commandeer an existing term from another discipline and redefine it to mean something completely [...]

ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US

There are four reasons I can think of why a company wants to buy another: To take a position in a market you didn’t expect to be in but has suddenly become important to you (e.g. EMC buying VMware) To take a position in a market you did expect to be in, but the internal [...]

When Space, Time & Vendor Charges Collide…

Well the whole snapshot and replication thing got me thinking about vendor licensing. Licensing is a way to get a return on one’s R&D, it doesn’t really matter whether customers pay x for hardware and y for software, or x+y for the hardware ‘solution’ and zero for software functions etc, as long as the vendor [...]

Bow ties are cool – When time and space collide

Every storage vendor has sales slides that tell us that data growth rates are accelerating and the world will explode soon unless you buy their product to manage that… …and yet the average IT shop is still mostly doing backups the old fashioned way, with weekly fulls and daily incrementals, and scratching their heads about [...]

Less is More – it’s a dedup vendor party

Dedup is happening fast all around us and the vendors are lining up, but it’s not always easy to compare what’s going on.

Hey this Gibibyte stuff is really taking off!

So you know we’re making progress on the binary units thing (see my post entitled “How many fingers am I holding up“) when Piratebay.org starts using GiB… 7,368,671,232  Bytes   =    7.37 GB     or    6.86 GiB Now if we can only get the IT vendor community to consistently follow Piratebay’s excellent [...]

6 ordinary things I really like about IBM N Series

I seem to have been doing a lot of work recently on solutions that involve IBM N Series (Netapp) products. There are a few annoying things about the product (e.g. the price, fractional reserve) but there are some things I really like, and they’re not necessarily exciting things or things that we make a big [...]

How many fingers am I holding up?

The base2 Vs base10 nett capacity question is an interesting one. It remains a place of confusion for customers and that’s not surprising as it remains a place of confusion for vendors also.

IBM N Series (Netapp) Capacity Sizing

One thing I left off this post is a discussion of fractional reserve. This can be a major and I should have covered it. Some people allow 100% extra space when provisioning LUNs out of ONTAP. FR is about guaranteeing that you have space to write changed blocks in your active filesystem. It’s hard to [...]