Posts by IO-IO

Hack once?

That's why Pure storage have a bespoke flash aware RAID implementation.

The real secret for treating flash well is to coalesce as many writes as possible.

oh dear

to stupidity and beyond!

IT nightmares

We should send Gordon Ramsay in to sort them out.

Their management GPS is so off course they've driven into the sea and kept on going.

Say what?

I've done the maths often enough on large VDI deployments. No one "saves" £9M without having some seriously wrong numbers.

ROI is difficult to get right unless corners have been cut.

just use the webapp

I realise that most of the people commenting are clearly so directionally challenged that they are incapable of getting anywhere without their noses stuck in a smartphone.

Go to google maps, when prompted to install a webapp on the device say yes. Enable safari location services and hey presto you have a google maps app.

I'm not an apple fan but it is sad just how much time people that don't have an apple device spend taking pot shots. Clearly Android and every other non-apple device is so flawless that it's not worth writing about but seriously - get a life. It's JUST a phone.

duh!

Cheap and nasty car (and butt ugly) - worse review.

Not sure what this has to do with IT. No self-respecting IT person would be seen dead in one of those.

Takes more than calling stuff "kit" to write an interesting motoring piece.

More top-fail than top-gear.

thats midrange storage for you

What do you expect when you ask a midrange storage device to deliver enterprise-class reliability?

You get what you pay for..

IBM who?

Aside from the fact that IBM have one of the weakest storage portfolios on the planet, how can the SVC be a good thing?

Most vendors are striving to deliver virtualisation capabilities in the array.

Adding another layer to your storage environment that still requires the actual storage to be managed is a very bad thing - how can additional points of failure and channelling all your data through another potential bottleneck help?

IBM deleveloped SVC to try compete with capabilities that other vendors already had in their hardware and that is missing in IBM's own tired storage line up.

The only people that love their SVC are those that have no clue about what enterprise storage is.

Idiot!

Flash appliances and enterprise disk systems are in separate markets and fulfil different requirements. Customers need large amounts of capacity that delivers high-levels of performance to a LOT of attached hosts. You can't do this today with a flash appliance.

These benchmarks show efficiency and performance - the cost per IOP was excellent for a high-end device and didn't require additional external virtualisation appliances to stripe across multiple backend arrays.

A single virtualised array that can scale this far - not easy to do or EMC would have benchmarked the VMAX ages ago.

Pull your head out of Netapp's backside long enough and you may understand what storage is really about.

Useless journalism..

hmmm

After many attempts it the upgrade on my iphone went through. The app restore failed losing a third of my apps and all my music. Took re-syncing and manually putting some settings back in to get it sorted.

Hopefully the ipad will go better..

Computer says no..

The problem with HP today is that it's full of people that have been there for 20 years or more and have no clue as to the world outside of HP's walls. They need new blood to get this company going again. Unfortunately any newcomers will find it hard to change a business where a massive beaurocracy has been built on "the HP way".

Anyone who has experienced the inner workings of the company will know that massive change is required in every aspect of the business.

Ironic considering HP has always preached about agility but have no clue how to do it in their own business.

round and round we go

Let's not forget its the board that hires the CEO. Since they keep getting it wrong perhaps it's time for new board members.

It is largely irrelevant who is at the helm, the massive amorphous mess that is HP will never change. It's too full of long time employees that have lost touch with what the modern IT world is and are happy to keep their heads down and disappear in the corporate machine.

WTF?

Latency is down to the array's ability to service request from disk or cache and has nothing to do with the wet piece of string inbetween (assuming you have a fabric made in the last decade).

Running apps on an array is a waste of money and just plain stoooopid!

Who thinks of this cr*p?

Only dumbass end-users and journalists would think it's a great idea.

give it a rest

SAS is an interface not a tier. Enterprise Flash disks are usually based on SAS anyway with a handful on FCAL

You can have different tiers of disk with the same interface, larger slower ones that are cheaper than smaller faster ones.

Tieiring is only as effective as the mechanism that moves it and EMC have yet to prove that FAST actually is fast. It certainly isn't easy to use which defeats the purpose of using a technology that is meant to be all-encompassing.

Maintaining the suitable ratio of flash to required non-flash capacity is also not cheap nor practical (yet). Much like EMC's cache to disk ratio - they are happy to charge you a truckload for it but the benefits are limited.

I look forward to an EMC SPC result on VMAX. It is impossible to hide the complexity it takes (and cost) to produce a big number. I am sure they will achieve a reasonable number, just the cost/IOP and commands per usable TB of SPC testing will be massive - and that is something they don't want the world to see.

Try write about things you understand, more fact, less "guesswork". If readers wanted guesswork they'd go to a psychic!

Also, yet another netapp reference, so at least its consistent. Thanks for taking the time to vacate Netapp's back passage to attend and EMC jolly..

Cloud Shmoud..

The latest delivery from the back passage of EMC's product management straight to your desktop..

Don't suppose EMC happened to pay for El Reg's trip over?

Spend enough time with the EMC brainwash machine and soon enough you will believe the nonsense it churns out.

Zzzzz

Just goes to show that EMC doesn't just invite any old tool to these vegas knees-up sessions.

At least the author is consistent in the BS that gets churned out.

One day, maybe one day we will get some decent reporting on things relevant to the real world of storage instead of this drivel.

err ok

I think you're missing the point.

Tiering is about efficiency and cost - making sure that data is on the right type of disk at the right time. Access time is not a relevant metric for tiering, it is generally based on frequency of access so that idle/stale data can sit on cheaper disk until it becomes relevant again.

Irrespective of the tier used all disk should be resillient so data integrity is never compromised.

What you should be focusing on is complexity. As much as most vendors have some form of tiering technology, very few have an implementation that are easy to use and sufficiently granular to not compromise performance.

SSD (for many vendors) is a great marketing tool but does little to make tiering relevant or to improve performance. In a well configured system very few applications will benefit from the reduced latency SSD offers. In fact, in highend arrays, many cache algorithims prevent getting the full SSD benefit anyway. The real benefit of SSD is being able to get many IOPS from relatively fewer disks. Due to cost and size constraints this only works if you can tier data on a sub-LUN basis.

In my experience, very, very few products out there can deliver this in a meaningful and sustainable manner.

omega

Slag the Alpha as much as you will, it was still a performance leader until poor management killed it.

Much of the architecture used today in X86-64 cpu's have DEC engineers to thank for getting them to where they are today.

Let's also not forget DEC's contribution to storage. They had pioneering work in SCSI systems and created what is today's Storageworks division in HP.

Had the company had better leadership and marketing the current lineup of vendors may have been somewhat different..

steaming pile of...

I suggest you read up on some basic laws of physics..

With most organisations clammering for low-latency disk solutions using SSD there will always be a massive market for disk vendors to provide online tier 1 and 2 disk. It does not matter how creative you get with network optimisation the technology will never allow for anything more than archival or backup data to be sent cloudwards.

Most organisations are focused on the private cloud which, guess what, exists on their own infrastructure.

Stop beating the cloud horse to death and recognise it for what it is...

(and please get some adult supervision for your next ramblings)

More stolen ideas

By definition a stack of technology adds complexity and does not simplify it. Clever tools and updated GUI's have to bring it together but does not remove the inefficiencies that exists when multiple layers have to work together.

Modern devices have built these capabilities natively into their product and don't, like EMC, have to rehash existing technology and create a massive storage strap-on.

Every recent announcement from EMC has stolen concepts from other more progressive tech and presented it as their own. These same vendors are the ones EMC refuse to acknowledge when they discuss their competition.

Mr author, how about a frank and reg-style analysis of EMC? The constant rim-jobs must be wearing you out!

yawn

Yet another overhyped EMC press campaign "revolutionising" the storage industry. Record breaking Zzzzzzzz blah blah.

Doesn't matter how much lipstick you put on a pig it's still a pig.

Brace yourself for more powerpoint waffle, "leaks" and gullible journos that will buy into it.

In the end all that is left is a Clariion in drag, you can't polish a turd.

it's the end of the world as we know it..

So if LSI are killing the product and HP pulled the plug on the EVA implementation why would the SVSP still exist?

I think if you look closely you'll find it has shuffled off it's mortal coil..

enterprise is more than a spaceship in star trek..

that may be a cool sounding idea and for really, really small organisations that think data is dispensible it might be a good idea.

What differentiates an enterprise hardware solution from something cheap and cheerful is the integration and error checking of all underlying components. When good tech goes bad it is the ability to manage the error conditions with the underlying disk that allows you to preserve data and service delivery. Just ignoring the underlying hardware and managing everything from software puts this responsibility elsewhere and with jbod the resillience simply isn't there to begin with.

High-end disk isn't going to disappear anytime soon, and trendy software/virtual appliances aren't going to change that.

If your current disk is complex maybe it is time to find a newer more relevant vendor.

TOSH

64GB to 1TB in 5 years not impossible but fitting that into a small formfactor without some major changes to memory density will be fun.

Unles of course you want an iSlab.

May as well wait for wireless FCOE and hook your iFad to your home storage device :)

Shock!

HP haven't added anything to the XP in the last few years, apart from cost.

Considering the acquisition of 3par this messaging from HDS doesn't come as a suprise.

The ship has sailed and HP are trying to find the life jacket.

Uhm..no

It is amazing how many ill informed people think that flash is the future.

The underlying architecture is no less flawed that rotational disk.

In the disk array world there is a whole lot of technology that is required to make sure your data is safe and sound and this, for the foreseeable future, will not go away and will in most cases be the bottleneck. As much as memory technology improves, its ability to meet growing customer data requirements will always lag behind. The cost per gig will also make broad adoption difficult.

Flash based storage has a place within a tiered environment but is a long, long way from ruling the datacenter.

The point solutions from TMS and others simply lack the pedigree and many other features that people need in the real world.