Tag: NAS

Posted on

StorageIO Spring Keynote and Speaking tour V2.008

Several new keynote and speaking engagements involving myself have been added to the StorageIO events page including among others:

April 8th, 2008 – SNW Orlando FL
Beyond Green-Wash:
IT Data Center Power, Cooling, Floor Space and Environmental (PCFE) Topics and Trends V2.008
This talk will move past what are the issues and reasons for going green and get right to the point of what you can do today leveraging various technologies, techniques and best practices to address PCFE and green environmental issues including EHS, low power and economic sustainment in an environmental friendly manner as well as what to include in a long term green strategy for your data center.

Chicago, May 13th-15th – StorageDecisions
Clustered Storage:
From SMB, to Scientific, to Social Networking and Web 2.0
The growth of structured and unstructured data continues at an explosive rate in most environments resulting in a constantly expanding data footprint requiring data and storage management resources. Similarly, the relative ease of use of NFS and Windows CIFS file sharing based storage, also known as Network Attached Storage (NAS), has led to a proliferation of NAS and Windows file servers which are not all that different from how the ease of use of personal computers (PCs) resulted in desktop and server sprawl. With the focus of many IT organizations today to do more with less, or, do more with what you have, clustered storage and clustered file serving have become a popular option to support modular, scalable and flexible growth. Clustered storage including clustered file serving, grid and web 2.0 based storage solutions are no longer confined to the specific high performance scientific applications they are commonly associated. Clustered storage serving is commonly being deployed to support a wide diversity of applications including commercial, entertainment or media, Web 2.0 and social networking along with grid, cloud and traditional scientific needs.

This session takes a look at among other topics:
? Look at what different clustered storage vendors are claiming and how their solutions differ
? Fact vs. Fiction, Myths and Realties of clustered storage
o Grid vs. Clusters, Cluster vs. Grid, what?s the differences
o Clustered storage is only for ultra large environments like Google
o Clustered file serving is only for high performance (HPC) environments
o SMBs and bulk storage applications can not benefit from clustered storage
? What are the caveats to be aware of when deploying clustered storage?
? What are some emerging trends and solutions to keep an eye on for clustered storage
? What are some questions that some vendors do not want you to ask about their solutions!

Green and Environmental Friendly Storage:
Practical Ways to Achieve Energy Efficiency
Green is in-and every storage vendor out there has a green story to tell. Despite the vendor and industry hyperbole about the environmental benefits of their products, there are still no standard metrics by which to measure and compare power consumption or energy efficiency claims. The challenge is sorting out and closing the gap between vendor green messaging and IT data center issues including power, cooling, floor space and other environmental topics including RoHS and e-waste disposal. This session looks at several practical techniques and technologies that you can leverage today to achieve an energy efficiency data center to sustain business growth in an economical and ecological friendly manner.

Topics that will be covered include among others:
? How truthful are vendor claims and what is ?Green wash?
? Facts and Fiction, Myths and Realities:
o Storage is cheaper to buy than to power
o Power avoidance vs. energy efficiency
o Are Solid State Devices (SSD) the silver bullet?
o Dedupe vs. Archive vs. Compression vs. Consolidation
? What?s real and achievable today, what are your options?
? Measuring and determining energy efficiency with emerging metrics
? How to do more with what you have and avoid forklift upgrades
? Who is the ?Greenest of them all? and where to learn more

I will also be keynoting at several TechTarget seminar series events around the U.S. including
StorageIO events page located here.

Cheers
GS

Posted on

Was today the proverbal day that he!! froze over?

Storage I/O trends

The upper Midwest, well, make that the Midwest in general was hit by high winds and a nasty cold front today, nothing all that unusual for January, especially in the Minneapolis area where the temperature yesterday was 40 to 45 with light rain and by about noon today about zero “F” without the wind chill. So in the face of old man winter and the cold, I had a chuckle today reading the announcement that an SPC (Storage Performance Council) SPC1 (IOPS) benchmark had finally been published for an EMC CLARiiON CX3-40.

Now for those of you who cover or track or cheerlead or dread EMC, you probably know there position on benchmarks, or at least of some of their bloggers and in particular, SPC and if not, read here for some perspective. My position has always been the best benchmark is your actual application in a real and applicable workload scenario, however also realizing that not everybody can simulate or test their applications, there is the need for points of reference comparison benchmarks such as SPC, Microsoft ESRP, TPC, SPEC among others.

Heres’ the caveat, take these benchmarks with a grain of salt; use them as a gauge along with other tools as they are an indicator of a particular workload. I am a fan of benchmarks that make sense, can be reproduced consistently and that are realistic representations, not a substitute for your actual applications. They are tools to help you make a better informed decision however that is all they are, a relative comparison.

Nuff rambling for now on that, why did I chuckle this morning and think that He!! had perhaps finally froze over, and don?t get me wrong, Minneapolis and the Midwest for that matter is far from being He!!!, granted its cold as crap during the winter months. The reason I chuckled is that EMC did not in fact submit the SPC1 benchmarks for the CLARiiON CX3-40, instead, one of their competitors namely Network Appliance (aka NetApp) did the honors for EMC along with a submission for their FAS3040.

So besides the fact that there is plenty of wiggle and debate room in the test for example NetApp using RAID6 (e.g. RAID-DP) and Mirroring on the EMC (I?m sure we will hear EMC cry foul), EMC can keep their hands clean on their party line about not submitting an SPC1 result, or at least that?s a card they could choose to play.I would like to see the DMX4 particularly with the new FLASH based SSDs in a future SPC test submission; however, I?m not going to hold my breath at least yet.

However it is ironic that EMC has in fact submitted other benchmark tests scenarios in the past including for Microsoft ESRP among others. Speaking of SPC submissions, TMS (Texas Memory Systems) also posted some new SPC results the other day.So maybe he!! did not really freeze over today with EMC finally submitting an SPC test, however it made for good warming chuckle on a cold morning.

Now, even though EMC has not officially submitted the SPC1 result, even though it is posted on the SPC website, that leaves only one major storage vendor yet to have their midrange open storage systems represented on the SPC results, and that would be HDS with their AMS series, maybe He!! will still freeze over…

Cheers

Greg Schulz – www.storageio.com