Archive for July, 2007

Getting more from Device Manager

I complained on a previous post about the lack of features in Device Manager. Consequently I’ve started writing some software to alleviate this situation. Here’s the first of hopefully a series of tools to plug some of the gaps. HDvM Checker will query a host running Device Manager &...
July 25th, 2007 | Uncategorized | Read More

SATA in Enterprise Arrays

In a previous post on DMX-4 I discussed the use of SATA drives in enterprise arrays. A comment from our Storage Anarchist challenged my view of the resilience of SATA drives compared to FC. Now unless I’ve been sleeping under a rock, the storage industry has over the last 5 years pummelled us...
July 25th, 2007 | Uncategorized | Read More

EMC posts higher earnings

EMC posted higher earnings today. Some 21% up on the same quarter last year. It’s amazing they’ve been able to manage double-digit growth for some 16 quarters. Interestingly (as reported by The Register) the shares ended the day down. However the shares have risen by over 100% over the...
July 24th, 2007 | Uncategorized | Read More

VTL Poll Results

The VTL poll is finished; results are: We’ve had it for years – 41% We’ve done a limited implementation – 14% We’re evaluating the technology – 27% VTL doesn’t fit within our strategy – 14% We see no point in VTL technology – 5% Obviously this...
July 24th, 2007 | Uncategorized | Read More

EMC Power – link?

Thanks to Barry/Mark for their posts/comments on power usage. Call me stupid (and people do) but I can’t find the EMC Power Calculator for download on Powerlink as ‘zilla suggests (although I did find a single reference to it). Can you post the link guys? Is it EMC internal only? If so,...
July 24th, 2007 | Uncategorized | Read More

DMX-4 Green or not?

After the recent EMC announcements on DMX-4, I promised I would look at the question of whether the new DMX-4 is really as green as it claims to be. I did some research and the results are quite interesting. Firstly we need to set the boundaries. One of the hardest part of comparing hardware from different...
July 20th, 2007 | Uncategorized | Read More

DMX-4

I’ve had a quick look over the specifications of the new DMX-4 compared to the DMX-3. There aren’t really a lot of changes. The backend director connectivity has been upped to 4Gb/s and presumably that’s where the 30% throughput improvement comes from (with some Enginuity code changes...
July 17th, 2007 | Uncategorized | Read More

Performance Part V

Here’s the last of the performance measurements for now. Logical Disk Performance – monitoring of LDEVs. There are three main groups Tuning Manager can monitor; IOPS, throughput (transfer) and response time. The first two are specific to particular environments and the levels for those...
July 17th, 2007 | Uncategorized | Read More

Bring it on!!

I’m glad to see EMC have upped the ante with their series of announcements today. I’ve not had time to digest them all but I did read Storagezilla’s refreshing post summarising a lot of the announcements. Once I’ve read things in a bit more detail then I’ll comment however,...
July 16th, 2007 | Uncategorized | Read More

Performance Part IV

Next on the performance hitlist is port tracking. This one is slightly more tricky to collect in Tuning Manager as HTnM uses absolute values for port throughput (Port IOPS and Port Transfer) in alerting, rather than relative values like % busy. This is a problem because the figures of both IOPS and...
July 16th, 2007 | Uncategorized | Read More
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