Performance Archives

March 8, 2009December 29, 2025

Work and Entertainment From Coast to Coast

A week ago I was in St. Petersburg, Tampa and Miami Florida for a mix of work and relaxation along with Karen (Mrs. Schulz), visiting with my cousin and her husband who lives in the St. Pete beach area for a few days before back to work. While in the St. Pete and Tampa area, for fun, we did an afternoon at Busch Garden including a ride on Montu. For those who have not ridden on Montu, here’s a video I found that someone recorded to help give you a perspective of the ride. Other fun activities included stops or time at Billys Stonecrab and Seafood joint, Kayaking, lounging pool-side, shelling at Ft. Desoto and St. Pete Beach as well as a visit to the Hurricane among others.

In Miami, the pool area at the Four Seasons including a nice cabana pool-side spot to escape the cool breeze made for a great relaxing and catch-up on some work spot while Karen relaxed in the sun. Some of the restraunts in Miami we visited when taking a break from work included Gordon Birsch and Rosa for some outstanding, made at the table side fresh Guacamole en Molcajet!.

Speaking of work, the Florida trip involved doing keynotes at events in both Tampa and Miami with a theme of IT Infrastructure Optimization with both events being well attended. Themes included doing more with less, or, doing more with what you have, addressing data footprint and data management to boost productivity, how to address the continued growth in data and need to process, move and store more data and information. A discussion point prompted the thought of if there is a data recession or not (See previous blog post and here). Other topics of discussion and interested included converged networking for voice, data and general networking, security, server and storage virtualization, performance and capacity planning, data protection and BC/DR among others.

This past week involved a lunch and learn Keynote in the Minneapolis area with a local VAR, before a quick trip to the other (left) coast for another IT Infrastructure Optimization session and keynote, this time in Los Angeles. Some common themes heard from IT professionals at this past weeks events echoed those heard in Florida as well as concern about managing encryption keys not to mention securing virtual environments and software licensing models in virtualized server environments. The trip to LA also enabled a quick visit with friend Bruce Rave of Go Deep fame who provided a great tour and sightseeing of the Hollywood music scene.

Hollywood stops included dinner at Genghis Cohens (The duck and cashew chicken were outstanding) followed by visits to the Cat and Fiddle and Infamous Rainbow Bar & Grill next door to legendary Roxy. People watching was great as was the music and ambiance including a Nikki Sixx of Motely Crew sighting at the Rainbow as well as Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN seen in hotel lobby minutes after appearing on Larry King Live.

Thanks too everyone who came out and participated in the seminar events in Tampa, Miami, Minneapolis and LA, look forward to seeing and hearing from you again soon. Now its time to get ready to head off too the airport for this weeks events and activities including stops in Las Vegas and Milwaukee among others.

Cheers
Gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

twitter @storageio

February 28, 2009January 23, 2019

Shifting Industry Trend, from Purchase to Leasing?

Storage I/O trends

I’m seeing and hearing a trend talking with vendors, vars and customers of what appears to be a shifting trend from purchasing to leasing of IT equipment which for some might be as surprising as saying that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Typically, or at least looking back in time, leases tend to be popular when cash is at a premium or during rapid growth phases such as during the dot com craze bubble of last decade.

Purchasing tends to be more popular when lease rates are high or when cash reserves are enough to take advantage of buy opportunities Consequently with tight credit and focus by many organizations on cash flow and cash reserves, it should not be as much of a surprise to see a shift to leasing. However what’s a bit different from earlier economic downturns when IT organizations typically shift from purchase to lease, is the tight credit markets or ability of some organizations to finance acquisitions. Consequently it will be interesting to see if there is a shifting trend from purchasing to lease particularly as the credit markets begin to open.

What are you seeing or doing, purchasing, leasing, out-sourcing or shifting to managed service providers or doing nothing?

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

November 8, 2008April 27, 2025

SSD activity continues to go virtually round and round

Storage I/O trends

Solid State Disk (SSD) (both FLASH and RAM based) activities and discussions continue to go round and round (pun intended) with announcements (here, here, here, here, here, and here and among others) of various improvements and evolution for technologies focused from the consumer to the small office home office (SOHO) to small medium business (SMB) to enterprise with technologies from vendors including Intel, Sandisk, Seagate and many others.

Recent innovations are looking to address write performance issues or challenges associated with FLASH based SSD, which while better than magnetic hard disk drives (HDD), are slower than their RAM based counterparts.

Other activity includes extending the useful life or duration of how many times a FLASH based device can be rewritten or modified before problems arise or performance degrades. Yet another activity is Sandisk introducing “virtual RPM” (vRPM) metrics to provide consumers an indication of relative revolutions per minute (RPM) of a non-rotating SSD device to make comparisons to help with shopping decisions makings. Can you say SSDs going round and round and round at least in a virtual world? Now that should make for some interesting “virtual benchmarking” discussions!

Meanwhile industry trade groups include the SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI) are gathering momentum to address marketing, messaging, awareness, education as well as metrics or benchmarks among things normally done around industry trade group camp fires and camp outs.

So, as the HDDs spin, so to does the activity in and around SSD based technologies.

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

January 29, 2008December 4, 2019

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

January 27, 2008December 29, 2025

The Many Faces of Solid State Devices/Disks (SSD)

Storage I/O trends

Here’s a link to a recent article I wrote for Enterprise Storage Forum titled “Not a Flash in the PAN” providing a synopsis of the many faces, implementations and forms of SSD based technologies that includes several links to other related content.

A popular topic over the past year or so has been SSD with FLASH based storage for laptops, also sometimes referred to as hybrid disk drives along with announcements late last year by companies such as Texas Memory Systems (TMS) of a FLASH based storage system combining DRAM for high speed cache in their RAMSAN-500 and more recently EMC adding support for FLASH based SSD devices in their DMX4 systems as a tier-0 to co-exist with other tier-1 (fast FC) and tier-2 (SATA) drives.

Solid State Disks/Devices (SSD) or memory based storage mediums have been around for decades, they continue to evolve using different types of memory ranging from volatile dynamic random access (DRAM) memory to persistent or non-volatile RAM (NVRAM) and various derivatives of NAND FLASH among other users. Likewise, the capacity cost points, performance, reliability, packaging, interfaces and power consumption all continue to improve.

SSD in general, is a technology that has been miss-understood over the decades particularly when simply compared on a cost per capacity (e.g. dollar per GByte) basis which is an unfair comparison. The more approaches comparison is to look at how much work or amount of activity for example transactions per second, NFS operations per second, IOPS or email messages that can be processed in a given amount of time and then comparing the amount of power and number of devices to achieve a desired level of performance. Granted SSD and in particular DRAM based systems cost more on a GByte or TByte basis than magnetic hard disk drives however it also requires more HDDs and controllers to achieve the same level of performance not to mention requiring more power and cooling than compared to a typical SSD based device.

The many faces of SSD range from low cost consumer grade products based on consumer FLASH products to high performance DRAM based caches and devices for enterprise storage applications. Over the past year or so, SSD have re-emerged for those who are familiar with the technology, and emerged or appeared for those new to the various implementations and technologies leading to another up swinging in the historic up and down cycles of SSD adoption and technology evolution in the industry.

This time around, a few things are different and I believe that SSD in general, that is, the many difference faces of SSD will have staying power and not fade away into the shadows only to re-emerge a few years later as has been the case in the past.

The reason I have this opinion is based on two basic premises which are economics and ecological”. Given the focus on reducing or containing costs, doing more with what you have and environmental or ecological awareness in the race to green the data center and green storage, improving on the economics with more energy efficiency storage, that is, enabling your storage to do more work with less energy as opposed to avoiding energy consumption, has the by product of improved economics (cost savings and improved resource utilization and better service delivery) along with ecological (better use of energy or less use of energy).

Current implementations of SSD based solutions are addressing both the energy efficiency topics to enable better energy efficiency ranging from maximizing battery life to boosting performance while drawing less power. Consequently we are now seeing SSD in general are not only being used for boosting performance, also we are seeing it as one of many different tools to address power, cooling, floor space and environmental or green storage issues.

Here’s a link to a StorageIO industry trends and perspectives white paper at www.storageio.com/xreports.htm.

Here’s the bottom line, there are many faces to SSD. SSD (FLASH or DRAM) based solutions and devices have a place in a tiered storage environment as a Tier-0 or as an alternative in some laptop or other servers where appropriate. SSD compliments other technologies and SSD benefits from being paired with other technologies including high performance storage for tier-1 and near-line or tier-2 storage implementing intelligent power management (IPM).

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

twitter @storageio

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