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.

Lots to talk about as a follow-on from today's discussion around virtual storage, global federation and the underlying distributed cache coherence technology that makes all this wonderful juju possible. Most of the focus was on the specific capabilities around global storage federation, and the underlying distributed cache coherence technology that makes all of this useful and interesting

For those of us in the IT business, we occasionally encounter a fundamental new enabling technology that forces us to reconsider some of our long-held notions around the way things work. I'd put server and desktop virtualization into that category, as well as the ubiquitous web.  If you're a storage person, flash has that potential as well.  If backup is your thing, the combination of dedupe and low-cost disks has changed how you think about things. In this post, I'd like to start to introduce a technology concept that — yes — has the potential to change a great deal of how we think about IT at scale.  And, yes, this is going to be a long post … Context Today, Pat Gelsinger did an important event with industry analysts.  You can see his materials and webcast here .  In addition, I wanted to offer up my views on this topic as well.  I'll be using his slide deck as a reference point

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

Day 2 of HP Blades Day took place in a new location – the Customer Experience Centre.  This was due to issues with Wifi on day 1, now resolved in our new location.  Order of the day was: Review of the previous day’s presentations with a quick question & answer session Presentation on Client Virtualisation Factory tour Client Virtualisation Joseph George presented to the bloggers on client (aka desktop) virtualisation.  Whilst HP seem to have a story in this area, I’m skeptical about the whole process of virtualising desktops at this stage, other than in certain use cases.  I can see benefits for the following: High availability environments such as financial traders, where loss of a desktop translates to financial loss. Large scale desktop deployments where functionality is generic.  A good example of this is call centres; desks only require access to limited features (so don’t need high powered devices) and physical desktops may be used by multiple users. Environments not suitable for desktop virtualisation will include mobile users and anyone running bespoke hardware or software with hardware dependencies

I’ve just been reading Greg Knieriemen’s post over at iknerd.com on the ending of Sun/Oracle’s OEM agreement with Hitachi to resell their high end storage arrays.  On the one hand I’m surprised by the announcement; on the other I’m not. Sun have resold Hitachi for some time under the 9990V and 9985V brand names.  These are no more than rebadged devices with Hitachi code and software under the covers.  From memory, I believe the only technical change is the cabinet door.  I have installed Sun supplied Hitachi technology in the past.  Sun provided no added value to the process – in fact when we encountered a microcode bug, Sun’s lack of knowledge hindered our problem resolution process

You say something often enough, it becomes a personal meme.  If enough people agree with you, and start saying the same thing, it might become an industry meme. In that spirit, let me share with you a meme that shows every sign of making that transition. Why?  Because I think people are ready to accept this particular thought as conventional wisdom. An Oversimplified History Of Cloud Thinking The first round of people talking about cloud were the technologists.  The message?

Given all the things that I'm engaged with these days, it was rewarding to see our friends at Cisco make a good set of announcements around enabling service providers with IaaS — Infrastructure as a Service.  And I'm a bit embarrassed that I didn't catch this earlier … But — at the same time — as I digest this announcement, I'm torn. There's a lot to like here.  But it also reinforces my notion that we — as an industry — have just started to travel down a rather long road …

As technologists, we all sort of know that traditional tape-oriented backup is rapidly being supplanted by newer forms of disk-based backup, usually in conjunction with data deduplication. But quantifiable data on the size and speed of this trend is notoriously hard to find. This latest result from TheInfoPro helps to frame just how quickly this trend is moving.

I had a conversation last week with a PR company doing research for Netapp.  This followed just after Netapp released their Q4 results, with revenue exceeding expectations at just over $1 billion