Archive for October, 2008

Get the Balance Right

It’s not very often I side with one vendor or another however after BarryB’s recent post regarding “Benchmarketing” I feel obliged to comment. Have a read of Barry Whyte’s rebuttal too. We see technology advancements because “concept” devices are used to drive...
October 31st, 2008 | Uncategorized | Read More

Who Ya Gonna Call?

Here’s a quality piece of reporting from TechCrunch on the state of Facebook and their data problems. I mentioned just last week in this post about their data growth. It’s incredible that they’re purchasing a new Netapp 3070 filer each week! I’m surprised that Facebook would...
October 31st, 2008 | Uncategorized | Read More

Pillar Crumbles

I picked this up last night on Mike Workman’s blog over at Pillar. Looks like they’re suffering the downturn. Storagezilla thinks this could be 30% of the workforce. I’m sure this is going to be one of many bad news stories from the storage industry we hear over the next few months. I’ve...
October 31st, 2008 | Uncategorized | Read More

SMI-S Is Dead

Take it from me, SMI-S is a thing of the past. If there’s one thing the last few months have taught me it’s how different each vendor’s products really are. I’ve been working on a tool called SRA (see the link here) which will report on storage in a consistent manner. Let...
October 30th, 2008 | Uncategorized | Read More

Understanding EVA – revisited

Thanks to all those who posted in response to Understanding EVA earlier this week, especially Cleanur who added a lot of detail. Based on the additional knowledge, I’d summarise again: EVA disks are placed in groups – usually recommended to be one single group unless there’s a...
October 29th, 2008 | Uncategorized | Read More

Virtualisation: LeftHand VSA Appliance – Part Two

In my previous post covering LeftHand’s Virtual Storage Appliance, I discussed deploying a VSA guest under VMware. This post discusses performance of the VSA itself. Deciding how to measure a virtual storage appliance’s performance wasn’t particularly difficult. VMware provides...
October 28th, 2008 | Uncategorized | Read More

Understanding EVA

I’ve not had much exposure to HP EVA storage however recently I’ve had a need (as part of a software tool project) to get into the depths of EVA and understand how it all works. The following is my understanding as I see it, plus some comments of my own. I’d be grateful for any feedback...
October 27th, 2008 | Uncategorized | Read More

Virtualisation: LeftHand VSA Appliance – Part One

I’ve been running the LeftHand Networks Virtual SAN Appliance for a while now. As I previously mentioned, I can see virtual storage appliances as a great new category, worthy of investigation for the flexibility of being able to provide functionality (replication, snapshots etc) without having...
October 22nd, 2008 | Uncategorized | Read More

Who needs FCoE anyway?

I’ve been working on getting my “home SAN” into a usable configuration over the last few weeks. One hassle has been VMware (and I won’t even mention Hyper-V again) and the support for fibre channel. I guess thinking logically about it, VMware can’t support every type...
October 21st, 2008 | Uncategorized | Read More

Facebook Facts and Figures

Have a look at this link from Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=30695603919 They’re now serving up 15 billion images a day! From the figures quoted, Facebook host 40 billion files as 1PB of storage, or 25KB per image. Peak load is 300,000 images a second, or 7.5GB per...
October 20th, 2008 | Uncategorized | Read More
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