Comments for The Storage Architect

Comment on Enterprise Computing: New HP Arrays – Updated by Mohammed

Mohammed — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 10:24:08 +0000

will, i’m comparing now the P2000 SFF G3 with the P4300 G2, P4300 G2 it seems more expensive than P2000, but i’m looking for your recommendations? which product do you recommend if you have the following application must be running and available:
1- SQL2005
2- Exchange 2007
3- DC and AD
4- CITRIX
5- ERP (MS Dynamics)
6- IIS (web server) ?
please help me?

Comment on Enterprise Computing: COPAN, EMC/VMware & STEC by Chris Evans

Chris Evans — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 21:55:15 +0000

So do you think we’ll see creep of free features? i.e. over time, more value add features will be freely offered?

Chris

Comment on Virtualisation: Home Lab Update by Chris Evans

Chris Evans — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 21:54:20 +0000

Bobby

Get the Netapp simulator. You’ll need a friend who works for Netapp (or is a customer) as the simulator isn’t publicly available. I’ve said it before, but just to emphasise, the simulator is superb.

CLARiiON is more difficult. You can find used hardware on Ebay that will get you going. Let me know how you get on.

Chris

Comment on Cloud Computing: Cloud /= Virtualisation by Chris Evans

Chris Evans — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 21:52:29 +0000

Tony, thanks for the comment! No need to remind me you’re IBM – remember all those years ago when you measured a 3380 for me?

Chris

Comment on Cloud Computing: Cloud /= Virtualisation by Tony Pearson

Tony Pearson — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:51:25 +0000

Chris, great post!

I find the NIST definition useful:
http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/cloud-computing/

Tony Pearson (IBM)

Comment on Virtualisation: Home Lab Update by Bobby

Bobby — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 03:54:21 +0000

Hey there, I want to stratup a lab to learn data ontap and EMC clarion OS system for the storage. Can you provide me some low cost suggestions. I currently have a CCNA and some cisco switches in my lab..

Comment on Enterprise Computing: COPAN, EMC/VMware & STEC by InsaneGeek

InsaneGeek — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 22:04:14 +0000

I’d say that since the VMWare ESXi hypervisor is free that your question is already answered. For all intensive purposes at a hypervisor ESX and free ESXi are the exact same thing. Aside from the obvious pure appliance ESXi vs ESX OS you can install agents, etc into. ESXi is ESX without a license for certain additional features, I run it at home free of charge already. I think the vendors are already on the same page that the hypervisor is free, and that they are going to charge for “value add”. To go from ESXi free to the same functionality of ESX Enterprise Plus just install a license (some people even say that ESXi is faster than ESX because there isn’t a console guest running).

I think the exchange of software from EMC to VMWare is this: VMWare has a long history of being agnostic (and having a bunch of general hype around it) that probably opens quite a few more doors to other vendor “innards”. If EMC was the one asking for some 3rd party low level API’s there’s probably quite a few companies that would just slam the door shut, either from a competition or from a “we just don’t care what a storage company has to offer”. If EMC asks NetApp for low-level API access, they’d probably tell them to pound sand; if VMWare asks NetApp for low-level API access they’ll probably have 50 developers flown in that afternoon. Other vendors want to work with VMWare… but I don’t think EMC in general has the same “draw”.

Also VMWare has simply made more management tools that people want to use. While I use a number of storage vendors tools (ECC, DFM, etc) as I note in my blog they all are pretty much crap: of the ones I’ve used it pains me to say this but unfortunately ECC has probably been the better of them but it’s still crap and they’ve had it for years and years to try and improve. IMO it’s very hard to argue that EMC does management tools better than VMWare (they have more of them all completely different beasts). While VirtualCenter is no where near “great” (try to get storage perf data out of it). The fact that they have been doing it better than us has to have been noticed by EMC/VMWare.

Comment on Enterprise Computing: HP Blades Tech Day – Roundup by Most Tweeted Articles by VMware Experts

Most Tweeted Articles by VMware Experts — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:25:43 +0000

[...] Short Take #36, the latest collection of virtualization-related news, post… 2 Tweets The Storage Architect » Blog Archive » Enterprise Computing: HP Blades Tech Day –… Storage and Virtualisation 2 Tweets Top free troubleshooting tools for Windows | [...]

Comment on Enterprise Computing: 3par and HDS – 50% Saving – Guaranteed? by Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:28:39 +0000

When is the reduction measured. immediately after migration or at some agreed later data?

The point of maximum effectiveness of a TP system is immediately after migration/creation. After that unless the app/filesystem is well behaved the ratio of actual data to provisioned storage will inevitably get worse as fragmentation and other filesystem artefacts clag up the TP system.

Comment on Enterprise Computing: So EMC, Where's Your Thin Persistence? by Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:10:29 +0000

Null/0 page reclamation has a rather limited set of use cases. Probably the most effective use being to reclaim null/o pages after a thik to thin migration assuming you don’t have access to something like Symantec SmartMove.

After that 0 page reclamation is much less useful because filesystems do not typically write lots of blocks full of nulls. When a filesystem deletes data it typically does not write nulls to the blocks that are no longer used, in stead it de-references the blocks, because these blocks do not contain nulls 0 page cannot reclaim them.

This is one reason why data recovery programs can recover deleted files.

What is required it intelligence at the host level to provide the TP system with a list of blocks that are no-null but which the filesystem is no longer using.

This capability exists today in the form of the Thin reclamation API developed by Symantec.