In his article “Feeding the Virtual Machines”, he discussed NAS and SAN deployment for a virtual environment and makes the bold claim:

“Most people tend to agree that NAS is easier [...] ]]> I’ve just read a couple of Gary O’s postings over at Thoughtput, the blog from Gear6.

In his article “Feeding the Virtual Machines”, he discussed NAS and SAN deployment for a virtual environment and makes the bold claim:

“Most people tend to agree that NAS is easier and more cost effective than SANs for modern data center architectures.”

I have to say that I for one don’t. Anyone who’s had to deploy hardware such as Netapp filers will know there’s a minefield of issues around security, DNS and general configuration, which unless you know the products intimately are likely to catch you out. I’m not saying SAN deployments are easier, simply that both SAN and NAS deployments have their pro’s and con’s.

The second post, Shedding Tiers questions the need to tier storage in the first place and Gary makes the comment:

“If money were no object, people would keep buying fast drives”

Well, of course they would. I’d also be driving a Ferrari to work and living in Cannes with a bevvy of supermodels on each arm but unfortunately like most people (and businesses) I have champagne tastes and beer money…

Tiering is only done to save money as Gary rightly points out, but putting one great honking cache in front of all the storage seems a bit pointless. After all, that cache isn’t free either and what happens if those hosts who are using lower tier storage don’t need the performance in the first place?

I almost feel obliged to use BarryB’s blogketing keyword…. :0)

There are a number of [...] ]]> 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 too I guess).

There are a number of references to energy efficiency, however the “old” and “new” DMX cooling figures are the same and power figures are almost identical. The improved energy efficiency I think is being touted due to the availability of 750GB SATA drives for DMX (not now but later) but in reality that’s not going to be a significant saving unless you’re filling your entire array with SATA drives. One statement I want to validate is the following:

“Symmetrix DMX-4 is the most energy efficient enterprise storage array in the world, using up to 70 percent less power than competitive offerings.”

There are some security enhancements – but there would have to be in order to justify the RSA purchase….

On the positive side, having the option of SATA drives is a good thing – I’d use them for Timefinder copies or dump areas. I wouldn’t fill an array with them though.

Perhaps the most surprising announcement is (in green for extra emphasis):

In addition, EMC plans to introduce thin provisioning capabilities for Symmetrix DMX in the first quarter of 2008, enabling customers to further improve storage utilization and simplify storage allocation while continuing to improve energy efficiency.

Whoa there, I thought from all the recent posts (especially this) that Virtualisation/Thin Provisioning was something to be used with care. It will be interesting to see how EMC blogkets this one…