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.

It’s pretty traditional to start the year looking at what will be prevalent in the coming 12 months.  In this opinion article, I will discuss whether we’ll see the prevalence of iSCSI or FCoE and what we can expect, looking back this time in 2011

This post is a guest posting from Jerry Huang from Gladinet  and discusses the differences between Microsoft’s cloud platform Azure and the Amazon S3 platform.    This month, Microsoft transitioned Windows Azure Platform from public preview mode to full production mode. Azure Storage is part of the Azure Platform and competes directly with Amazon S3.