Ray Lucchesi has posted a great blog over at RayOnStorage that I wanted to recommend. Both the piece and the feedback are very valuable.
Though he explicitly excludes comparisons of rigs using caching or SSD-based sub-LUN tiering with those using spindles, I for one would be more interested in a direct comparison.
Let’s say that I want to reduce power consumption and numbers of drive failures, so I want to find an alternative to short stroking a bunch of disk drives to get IOPS. When I think about alternatives — for example XIO’s unique application of “hot sheets” technology wherein “hot” data is swapped from disk onto SSD until it “cools off” (e.g., is less frequently or concurrently accessed) — it seems like I could derive the same or better IOPS without as many drives. That sounds pretty cool, but I want to see a head to head comparison of performance between these two strategies.
Frankly, I am unimpressed by IOPS claims of most big rig vendors who spin up hundreds of short stroked spindles to get performance. If this sub-LUN stuff (swapping between SSD and disk) will get me the screaming performance I need with less spindles and less cost, that is how I want to go.
When I put this out on twitter, a fellow came back to me with the observation that speed and efficient power is not the only reason to prefer an HP/3PAR rig — I should also consider “recovery/availability/reliability etc.” Hmm…
I did a series of training seminars last year on this topic that, curiously, received great attendance in London — but not so great in the US, where storage efficiency is confused with storage IO performance, it seems. I started my preso pining for an app that would let me evaluate storage efficiency…
Here is the top menu for my theoretical storage efficiency app
Drilling down…
Capacity Allocation Efficiency submenu
The first option would provide, at a glance, a metric or two concerning capacity allocation efficiency, which some folks think is all there is to storage efficiency — making sure your apps and users have enough elbow room to save their data…
But capacity allocation efficiency is only part of the issue...
I think we really need to start getting real about capacity utilization efficiency, which looks at what data is being stored and its value to the business, frequency of re-reference and cost of storage to determine how it should be stored…
Hence a Capacity Utilization Efficiency metric option...
There are other metrics to track as well…
Including IO performance...
And
data protection services status...
And…
energy consumption metrics...
Whether you adhere to climate science or find yourself in a state of denial, we still need to pay the power bills. According to Dell, storage is now the biggest power hog in the data center. So we need metrics on that too.
Basically, this app would be useful in determining our overall (in)efficiency in storage infrastructure. Additional metrics, which I surveyed in my slides, would give us different views of efficiency from an operations perspective and a financial perspective.
While I am flattered that my recent rejoin to the blogosphere has been met with much email, I must request that vendors stop asking me to post their video commercials or advertorials here. This blog is just my own musings and observations, not a platform for advertising. That goes for Cisco, Oracle and the other company that have approached me recently.
Frankly, it strikes me as somewhat sinister that a couple of vendors asked me what my rates would be to either write-then-post, or allow them to ghostwrite and post under my name, entries that extol the virtues of their wares. In one case, the emailer said he was from a new department that was reaching out to “thought leaders” like me in the blogosphere to offer me a new income stream reprinting their “insights.” If other bloggers are doing this, and I suspect a few are, they are violating the fundamental premise of independent blogging. Soon, you won’t know who paid whom to write what, and that will diminish the worth of everything we write on all independent blogs.
Please, vendors, you can’t pay me enough to write nice things about you. When your products or services merit a positive comment, I am your greatest cheerleader. But when your product is crap, I am just as satisfied to write that.
Regarding the Cisco commercial, a highly stylized video about cloud computing just posted to YouTube (go find the URL yourselves, readers, if you are interested), high production values can’t whitewash the realities of what you are describing. Everything you talk about works really well (maybe), but only if we buy only Cisco gear. That is a lock-in, and I have a knee-jerk reaction to those. The other observation I would offer is that innovation is not synonymous with outsourcing, and never has been.
While the cloud folks (at least the storage clouds that I track) would like you to accept the definition Controlled Locus for Offloading Unmanaged Data, my take is somewhat different.
A storage CLOUD is usually a Career Limiting Outsource of Unappreciated Data storage assets mostly promulgated by industry analysts I regard as Con artists Leveraging Obfuscation and flawed business value arguments to Undermine Datacenters and their staff. I scoff at public storage clouds and make my case in the next storage column I wrote for ESJ.com.
Welcome back. Today, I am feeling very blessed. My inbox has been peppered by folks wondering what has become of my posts here. Went silent during months of heavy travel, using Twitter to keep in touch, then over the holidays, my little petri dishes blessed me with the flu while they were on Christmas break, [...]
Just back for Storage Decisions in NYC, where I got to deliver two talks to a big crowd — bigger than last year, possibly reflecting increased need to find economical storage solutions. I was disturbed to find this article in my inbox, from Arthur Cole at IT BusinessEdge. Seems like we are right back to [...]
I have to do this. I have to recognize a product that was sent to me and that I have found myself using a lot lately, and with great results. No, it isn’t a sexy new array with a unique head filled with shiny things. It doesn’t have blue neon lights tricking out its exterior. It doesn’t cost [...]
Remember when Summer used to be filled with frolic and freedom. Time off from school or work. Time for guilty pleasures — reading an off-topic book, going to see a Summer Blockbuster film, eating the wrong food and slacking off on workouts, perhaps drinking a bit more and without the justification of a “business meeting,” [...]
Soon to be published in Storage Magazine in the Netherlands… WHEN A CHILD MISBEHAVES BY JON TOIGO To paraphrase a popular comedian of the late 1990s: of all the things I’ve sacrificed in the course of parenting six children, I miss my mind the most. I know, raising kids is portrayed as a joyous and [...]
I read with great amusement this report from VMworld regarding “next gen vStorage APIs” envisioned by VMware engineers. Sounds a lot like they are planning to try to build a set of microkernels designed to deliver “storage hypervisor” functionality within the server hypervisor microkernel morasse. Good luck with that. Really. Has it dawned on anyone [...]
