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* Posts by WhoTheHeckCares?

3 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Mar 2011

Who's the fat kid on the storage see-saw? We think it's All-Flash

WhoTheHeckCares?

Not sure you're looking at the latest two quarters of IDC Q/Q and Y/Y growth for storage...

"Some mainstream suppliers such as EMC, HP and NetApp, are seeing a downturn in revenues from their traditional arrays."...

If you look at IDC's market share figures for storage, lately EMC and Netapp (and all others except HP) have been flat or down, but HP has increased it's storage market share by a fairly sharp margin, over the last couple of quarters. The HP 3Par product line offers AFA, hybrid/converged, and traditional/HDD all using the same controller nodes, and with all the data services (automated tiering, thin provisioning and dedupe, replication, T10 unmap and checksum, effectively unlimited snapshots, and more) that you could ask for, now including both Object and NAS directly out of the nodes. Add in the extra goodness of HW "array-off-load acceleration" via ASIC, 4-node HA, six nines of availability guaranteed, peer-motion transparent migration and other useful features that customers seem to value, I don't really believe that you do your readers a service by lumping HP in with the other two, credible storage players though they all most certainly are. Have a look at the most recent market share figures - not just the last couple of months, which can be due to random factors, but the last 6 months, say, and see if you don't agree with this assessment. The trend seems to be solid, and continuing.

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CIA rendition jet was waiting in Europe to SNATCH SNOWDEN

WhoTheHeckCares?

Why is the jet in the "teaser photo" an SR71 Blackbird?

The photo in the teaser link on the Register web pages shows an SR-71 Blackbird spy plane - long retired from service, although it routinely did photo recon for the CIA - and not the humble corporate Gulfstream jet shown in the photos in the body of the story. Not that it really matters, but, one more or less expects the Register to get such things right. I suppose that all news sources use hype in their teasers, to get people to watch or click on them. Still, I'm amused and slightly disappointed in El Reg for such a silly inconsistency. I mean, why not show a jumbo jet, or an F14 Tomcat, or a British Harrier, as long as we're being absurdly fanciful in the photos? Oh well... either way, it went back empty.

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EMC blows benchmark away - again

WhoTheHeckCares?
Grenade

For some interesting spinny disk contrast, check out the NFS spec2008 results

EMC only participates in benchmarks they can find a way to do well in. They are completely absent from the SPC-1 benchmark, where they would show very badly vs. 3PAR and HDS, among others. Amusingly enough, Netapp posted results for EMC Clariion a few years back, to prove this point (weeping and gnashing of teeth from EMC could not prevent the benchmark, check out SPC-1 results from Netapp to see the two results for EMC).

That said, I note with interest that on the NFS side of the sfs2008 benchmark, the "flash-only" EMC absurdity produces not quite 500,000 whatevers. IBM's Scale-Out NAS (SONAS), using spinny disks, produced just over 400,000 of the same whatevers (albeit with much higher latency towards the upper end of the performance curve). And HP produced a very respectable 333,000 whatevers out of a collection of HP-UX blades and a bunch of spinny disks. Where is HP's x9000 scale-out NAS box, and why post results for a non-commercial NAS config, when HP has a whole NAS line under the Storageworks division? We can be speculate.

Moving down the list, Blue-Arc both showed fairly pathetic numbers around 150,000 NFS whatevers for their top end box. Netapp only a little better at just under 200,000 whatevers at their high end, along with much lower numbers for their mid-tier offerings. And Isilon (seemingly a direct competitor for SONAS, and the leader in the scale-out space) only managed about 140,000 NFS whatevers. All very interesting, at least to me.

As to whether or not ZFS would show as good or better results if outfitted with a huge collection of SSDs, I don't see Sun/Oracle represented at all, which seems odd since Sun had the ZFS-based J9000 line before Oracle bought them, and even has some SPC-1 benchmark results posted (with pathetic IOPS figures, but at such a low price point that the $/IOPS were not too bad). They really should show up somewhere on this sfs2008 report, either NFS or CIFS or both... but, alas, N/A.

So, I guess I would like to see the graph that accompanied this story show both CIFS and NFS results, along with the various credible NAS vendors and all of their results, from either benchmark. I know the two benchmarks don't compare directly (CIFS "whatevers" don't equal NFS "whatevers"), but the NFS side does seem to be much more competitive, with at least one legitimate, commercially available spinny disk setup that almost matches EMC's best efforts at juking the benchmark.

The Register did a decent job of sorting the NFS side out here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/23/enc_vnx_secsfs2008_benchmark/

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