September | 2008 | The Storage Architect

From the monthly archives: September 2008

DMX Configuration Options

By Chris M Evans On September 4, 2008 · Leave a Comment · In Uncategorized

I’ve been looking at DMX configuration options this week. Essentially the question is how best to lay out a DMX-3 or DMX-4 array with a tiered configuration. For me there are two options and it’s pretty clear which I prefer. First a little background. The following diagram shows the way DMX drives are deployed within [...]

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Does XIV spell the end for the IBM/Netapp relationship?

By Chris M Evans On September 3, 2008 · 4 Comments · In Uncategorized

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the position in the market for Nextra, IBMs disk storage product, acquired with the purchase of XIV at the beginning of the year. I’ve been mulling it over and I have to say it creates a dichotomy for me.

On the one hand I see some of [...]

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Tiered Storage/Broadband Model

By Chris M Evans On September 3, 2008 · Leave a Comment · In Uncategorized

Comments on my last post reminded me of a conversation I had recently regarding the setting of specific performance criteria for storage tiers. Some companies attempt to set specific performance guarantees; for example setting tier 1 storage to a response time of 10ms or less, tier 2 to 20ms or less.

I [...]

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How Many IOPS?

By Chris M Evans On September 2, 2008 · 13 Comments · In Uncategorized

A question I get asked occasionally is; “How many IOPS can my RAID group sustain?” in relation to Enterprise class arrays.

Obviously the first question is to determine what the data profile is, however if it isn’t known, then assume the I/O will be 100% random. If all the I/O is random, then each I/O [...]

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The Right Way to do Vendor Comparisons

By Chris M Evans On September 1, 2008 · Leave a Comment · In Uncategorized

Good old Chuck Hollis has stirred up the vendor vitriol over the last week with two posts comparing the capacity efficiency of EMC’s CX4, Netapp’s FAS and HP’s EVA products. See “Your Usable Capacity May Vary” and “Updates to Capacity Post”.

Unsurprisingly, Chuck’s conclusion is that EMC comes out [...]

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