Storage Nation

IOPS Per RAID Group, ordered by most to least I took part in a podcast last night that discussed the XIV platform.  One of the “key features” of XIV is the wide striping of data across all spindles.  It’s a concept we’re seeing more and more in contemporary storage hardware architectures and one that’s being shoe-horned into older storage arrays too.  Have you ever wondered what the point is?  Take a look at the following graphic.  It shows the number of write operations per RAID group, ordered by the busiest RAID group to the least active.  It’s real data from a real system.  What you see is the Long Tail effect, where a small number of RAID groups are doing most of the I/O.  In this example, 80% of the workload is performed by 50% of the RAID groups; only 3 RAID groups account for 20% of the workload.

A while back we did a storage assessment for a non HDS customer and showed him that his storage utilization was actually around 30% which is typical in most accounts. While that was not surprising to the operations people this was a surprise to the financial people who could not understand why 70% of their storage capacity, in this case, several hundred TBs, was not being utilized. Management was embarrassed and immediately fingers were being pointed at the storage architect and storage administrators, who in turn pointed to the application users who were asking for way more storage than they appeared to need.

I finally managed to attend a London CloudCamp last Thursday, which conveniently co-incided with a #storagebeers evening.  For two hours of listening to the collective wisdom of the presenters and the “unpanel” we were offered free beer and food

Okay, I knuckled under to pressure.  First, Leigh Grace tried to sell me on Twittering (which led me to use it as a way to notify everyone about new posts here), then I got a call from Rose Ross over in the UK who relayed to me that folks were sending me messages — tweets

ESJ.com is running another of our C-4 Project video segments, this time with CEO and Chairman of FalconStor, ReiJane Huai.  Check it out. Mr. Huai reflected on his role in bringing tape backup to the distributed world, then offered commentary on several topics of interest including the formation of mini-me mainframes (“if you are going to

The tickler I received in email this AM filled me with interest in what Mr. Foskett, lately of Nirvanix, was going to write about this question in his multi-part blog.  My fingers tingled with expectation as I keyed in the URL for his postings

Over the last week there have been a few stories catching my eye.  Here’s a brief paragraph on them. SGI Acquires COPAN Systems In fact to be more precise, SGI have acquired some of the assets of COPAN and left the liabilities behind for a mere $2 million in cash ( press release ).  The demise of COPAN raises two potential questions; is spin-down a dead technology or were COPAN in a market that wasn’t able to understand their technology

Hitachi Data Systems has been very successful selling the benefits of Storage Virtualization and Dynamic Provisioning.

Here’s my roundup of all the posts, pictures, video and comments from the HP Blades Tech Day Tweets The official hashtag for the event was #hpbladesday with hundreds of tweets being generated from the start of the Tech Day until now. Bloggers’ Posts By name order, here are the relevant posts from each blogger

The other news item I alluded to in the previous post is a little company called Nasuni.  I chatted with them at the urging of the smartest PR person in the business, Judy Smith at JPR Communications, a couple of days ago and I thought I would share my views here. Here is a pretty picture