Posts by NoSh*tSherlock!

But knowing even a little about how things work can’t do any harm, can it?”

ENORMOUS HARM - when we are continually having experts overriden by opinionated barely sentient people who "know about" something. Sound familiar?

Return on $2.1B Investment

Somehow I cannot feel impressed.

To Richard French

Neutrinos are seriously hard to direct - from Cern they simply aimed directly at Grand Sasso through the earth - and they went through without a problem - further reading will tell you they are so good at slipping through stuff they receiver at Grand Sasso is solid lead and only records an occasional impact,

So it is much like light going throuh space on a tiny scale - as far as a neutrino is concerned the occasional atom nucleus is so far from the next that a collision is very rare. Furthermore a neutrino does not carry any charge (AFAIK - correct me if I am wrong) so it does not easily get diverted by electrons or protons.

If you sent it down a fibre optic it would simply go straight out at the first bend.

Less than half the picture

Without the bandwidth charges there is no way to compare the costs - they could just as well be free and charge the earth to read and write

A kid with his first car

AS part of the learning experience many of us have souped up a basically weak platform with added high performance components - your first car, a hifi or soundsystem, a camera with lenses, your overclocked games machine, your iToy with apps -

AND

There is nothing wrong with those efforts until they reach extremes and you look back in hindsight.

This simply sounds like a failure in management allied to giving toys to a tinkerer.

You pays your money and takes your choice - I have seen just as many examples of forklift refreshes fail to deliver becaues the key IP is lost.

Gordon Brown's bank account?

Well at least that is in the public interest - and fair too as he hacked into mine and removed large chunks for the last ten years and then left us all in debt.

Simply another useful analysis input.

I come form the 'More information is better' school and welcome ALL benchmarks that include published details.

Yes it would be useful to include pricing metrics - but honestly these change from the date of publication quite rapidly, and differ internationally with local pricing affected by shipping, exchange and taxes.

I have used spec benchmarks (since LADDIS) since they began and they have ALWAYS provided a good insight into comparative performance and sizing. They also give a flavour within a vendor of their range and highlight what is needed to get best results.

So the SPEC NFS was not broken when NetApp published a Million IOPS in May 2006 http://www.spec.org/sfs97r1/results/res2006q2/sfs97r1-20060522-00263.html

AND it is certainly not broken now when EMC published half that 5 years later on a newer version of the benchmark. (yes I know they are not comparable - but for marketing a million trumps half a million).

The item above highlights the problem - the marketing use which is purely aimed at producing a winner, which is only relevant to the single biggest baddest configuration which has been lashed together.

Properly using the benchmarks provides access to information on entry level boxes, comparisons on midrange and comparisons on the use of flash, fast and slow disk and differing caching approaches including 'super cache extensions' using flash.

Despite the fuss about the 'pure flash' entry - it is simply another documented entry to compare - and gives a good reality check to what you will get from those expensive drives.

So you want your cake and to eat it

It is great to have TR write a balanced article, maybe combining this one and http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/02/mozyhome_charges_usets_more/

would really illustrate the mob mentality of those WHO DID NOT BOTHER TO UNDERSTAND THE RISKS AND WON'T PAY FOR THE SERVICE THEY NEED

The world is full of bleating losers - the only way to improve this is a bit of tough love - grow up!

Wood - Trees?

It's driving 1200 disks and you worry about the power consumption of the CPU?

Idiot design

Classic example of a web site that regenerates the information for each viewer instead uf publising a simple HTTP page which could then be cached and viewed by millions

Storage Teiring?

Is it just me?

Somehow the idea of tiering and large capacity SATA drives on an enterprise array is like the idea of having economy seats on the (now sadly out of service) Concorde.

Tiering between High performance drives and Flash - yes, and then suddenly the array WILL NOT scale to fill all available drive slots, so the HP view makes the most sense.

Why leave W. Curtis Preston out when he has already published opinion?

See

http://www.backupcentral.com/content/view/299/47/

for the view of probably the best known backup commentator

Seriously?

"Fowler is Oracle's top dog for server and storage systems and it's worth paying attention to what he likes and dislikes"

So he was part of the merger of SUN and STK and then asleep while the value disapeared until they begged for Oracle to buy them.

Man he is so influential I will go back and read everything he ever said.

Chris?

It's time for somebody to build the company and the people

I would suggest Dan Warmenhoven has the standing, experience and ethical background for chairman - and with his record of getting staff to love working for the company will make the most dramatic positive change. This will fulfill the leadership requirement.

A separate need is for execution for which many of the mentioned candidates are more suitable.

To All parents of students £40 not £109

Register at http://www.software4students.co.uk/ and at least get the software at a reasonable price.

Not that I want to send the money to MS etc but sometimes needs must!

I am much more worried by the back story - as MS probably only needs a small percentage of the NHS to be compelled to pay up, and maybe to initiate some court action to get the same income.

In the end it shows that every product has a value and a risk - the value was maybe OK at the original price, and the risk is the cost of being locked in or exiting. I hope they take the same hard approach of getting free from the MS lock in that they are doing with being in debt - JUST DO NOT DO IT AGAIN!

and no mention of VMWare's bestest best buddy daddy EMC?

So here the fun starts - VMWare unlike the OS world have realised that they can influence external storage development i.e that which is in the arrays, and this will dramatically show up the difference between those with real functions and those with none or tickbox implementations.

It is also a strategic move for VMWare against particularly Hyper-V which comes form a MS background of treating all storage as dumb DAS

Does this make sense??

So there will be a loss of 600,000 jobs in the public sector - right?

That means we will be borrowing less and paying less interest - right?

so we borrow from banks and pay interest to banks - right?

and by doing this the UK will be worse off?

we will have lower growth than under labour ? how is that possible - if you add in the borrowing Labour had the worst destruction of value in UK history.

alternative - we pay to keep another 600,000 public sector jobs - to do what exactly?

SERVICES! you say? I cannot bloody afford those services.

secondly providing services will definitely not give the UK growth.

every sensible person who does not have their hand out knows this:-

I cannot spend money I do not have or I will be worse off later.

Gordon did for years and it is now later.

@Man Mountain

Well that was pretty weak, but at least you started with youir prejudicial assumption "Well it's a file server for starters ...".

So lets try to have a proper go.

NetApp designed from day one to be a storage device - go look at all the components that are storage oriented versus those that are server oriented - and I will remind you that originally NAS meant Network Attached STORAGE not server. So what was required -

RAID protected disks

battery backed up cache

simple controller code without the ability to run external applications

management that only covered allocating space and access, not that used the data itself.

The big design difference was that that netApp chose to relocate the metadata responsibility of the file system from servers to the storage. And no it was not designed to be low end - even today it outperforms server based file systems by a big margin. Scale out clusters are however another area and we were contrasting EMC which does not do that either.

Secondly the systems have enjoyed 18 years of development, and Dave Hitz and others are on record about how well the basic design of the system lent itself to development, often to their delight and surprise. There are no penalties for serendipity.

No it is not the best in neverything it does, and there are a multitude of edge cases where a particular product is better in some respect. But there is no other single product which covers such a large section of market requirement with the same level of performance, protection and reliability, let alone versatility.

Are there weaknesses?. of course - but funnily enough some of those you mention are exactly that - and are not relevant in all cases, or easily managed.

" it was originally designed to be a low end file server, which I will accept it is very good at" as you must since the highest demand users from WETA/Industrial Light and Magic through Yahoo choose them first.

"WAFL is highly optimised for writes" correct - so it is weaker on sequential read (only if the file has been repeatedly modified and fragmented), excellent on random read (wide stripe plus greater time allocation to reading), standard on sequential write and excellent on random write.

"But it genuinely isn't so well suited to read heavy workloads. It does slow down as it fills up" depends on what you refer to - seq read agreed to above - the point being that it starts at a faster level than the competition - see http://blogs.netapp.com/shadeofblue/2008/10/finding-a-pair.html and really look at the graph.

I agree the clustering is not that clever - and for a SAN implementation rather clunky

"The dedupe is free for a reason" is really dismissive without any credibility - it works wonders for some applications and does little for others - granted, and you get it without any extra cost is a bad thing?

So what has emerged each time is repetitive banging on about how bad they are and must be avoided because of some particular behaviour or feature which is not as perfect as you would like it to be - so would I, but which you do not offer a better single solution.

So this is a call out - put something forward that you will defend as better all round

And what happens next......

An EMC blogger has been going at it to publicise and prove EMC's figures - http://www.pkguild.com/2010/05/emc-20-unified-storage-guarantee-exposed/

and then it turns out the netApp tool has a bug in it! This overstates the need for space.

Wonder how much real research EMC did before they did the guarantee - think Chuck was right and they should have stayed away