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back to article Flash biz and virtual database chum: Our tests show we bust spinning rust

A flash array speed merchant and database virtualisation firm have got together to run a benchmark that shows their disk array brethren eating their dust. Delphix takes a master database and makes virtual copies of it for whomever needs them, including accounting types, big organisations trying to control data spread, and …

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  1. Diskcrash

    News Flash!

    Formula One race car goes faster than white van.

    While it is interesting in a very basic way it really doesn't tell anyone anything not already known. So on a cost per IO it wins hands down but I suspect on a cost per GB of capacity it loses badly since I am going to guess that to get 900K IOPs for $2 million that they probably purchased a lot of spinning rust. They say to support 26TB of database they only needed 1.5 TB of flash but I would love to find anyone silly enough to pay $2 million for a 26TB array as I have some property in Spain I would like to sell them.

    It would be more interesting and even possibly useful if they compared their performance to a Violin or other flash system.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      Re: News Flash!

      I am going to be very blunt here:

      Does it appear that El Reg proudly, and enthusiastically, forwards pro-flash stories all too frequently? Including the recent poll, which included a bit of delicately placed non-objective wording.

      As you state, we all know flash gains performance but the issue for the good majority of users is per cost ratio - and flash, by that metric, stays remains on the Wish List as "Maybe, Someday...".

      When we/you/they do not have much storage space demands it is easy to switch, or justify a switch, to flash. However, once capacity becomes a factor it looks like 'rust' will be here for, at least, a while to come.

      And we may as well grow to accept that reality.

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  2. btrower

    I like it

    It is clever and sensible. It takes advantage of the differences in flash and spinning drives. I hope, though, that this is *not* hooked directly to the real database for read. It is complicated enough to have bugs...

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Where are the clones?

    Congratulations but why does Pure need Delphix to do this? Does that mean Pure is just a speed merchant with no application integration and efficiencies beyond snapshots and deduplication? It sure does to me

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Whoop tee do

    Got to give it to pure. Their funding announcement generated more buzz that their products. Dedicating an article to this shows the power of their PR agency.

    Question still lies with the fact how many paying customers do they have using the shit. In production. Fact of the matter is this is no different than XtremeIO and upcoming get FlashRay which are inferior to the price / capacity-perf of hybrid storage systems like FAS and VNX. Admins shouldn't be chumpified with all flash arraya

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  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Why use any vendor's array with ZFS?

    From what I can see, Delphix is a ZFS based system, and ZFS does its own RAID calculations (called RAIDZ), so all you should do is present disks (not LUNs) to ZFS who then does its ultra-clever RAID'ing.

    If you want SSD acceleration, you create a write cache (called an SLOG) out of something like STEC ZeusRAM SSDs, and a read cache (called L2ARC) out of something like 200GB SLC SSDs. Then the rest of your storage pool can be large SATA drives.

    I don't get why Pure are involved here, surely their array creates iSCSI LUNs, which are then seen by ZFS as drives, which it then RAIDs again?

    Or was Delphix configured differently to take account of the fact that the "drives" it sees are real LUNs?

    AC because I work for a ZFS vendor/integrator.

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