How Did Microsoft and Intel Get 1 Million iSCSI IOPS?
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage on 19. Mar, 2010 | View Comments
Ever since Microsoft and Intel declared that the combination of Windows and Nehalem could deliver over a million iSCSI IOPS, I’ve been curious about just how they did it. What black magic could push that many I/Os over a single Ethernet connection? And what was on the other end? Now Intel has revealed all in a whitepaper, and the results are surprising!
Innocence, Fairness, and Technology Benchmarks
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage on 26. Feb, 2010 | View Comments
HP recently commissioned Tolley Group to benchmark their BladeSystem c7000 against the Cisco UCS 5100. The short report focuses on two results, and reads like so many competitive benchmarks in the IT industry: Tolley focuses on metrics that highlight the strength of HP’s solution and the weaknesses of Cisco’s. What’s the real value of pinpoint maximum-performance benchmarks like this?
Ramdisks: Back From the Brink of Extinction
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Computer history, Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 15. Jan, 2010 | View Comments
Using system memory for storage is something of a lost art these days. But many of today’s I/O intensive tasks can still benefit from the untouchable quickness provided by a ramdisk. Happily, most operating systems are still capable of creating and using ramdisks.
Microsoft and Intel Pushing iSCSI Performance Limits
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage on 07. Jan, 2010 | View Comments
“Maximizing Hyper-V iSCSI Performance with Microsoft and Intel” might sound like another “blah blah” marketing piece, but a little birdy tells me that this webcast will drop a bombshell about iSCSI performance.
Flush Time
Posted by Stephen in Computer history, Enterprise storage on 19. Oct, 2009 | View Comments
Single-parity RAID is under attack. Caching is the hottest trend in storage. The end of the high-performance disk drive is imminent. What happened? Increasing areal bit density has caused disk capacity to grow much faster than disk performance. A presentation at Storage Networking World by Ronald Bianchini of Avere exposed the mathematics of this phenomenon.
We Hold These (Storage) Truths…
Posted by Stephen in Computer history, Enterprise storage, Everything, Gestalt IT on 12. Oct, 2009 | View Comments
I usually welcome discussion (and even argument) about the things I know best: There is always more to learn, and the best insights come through engaging those who disagree with us. But some ideas have been argued so well for so long that they deserve enshrinement. For example, although non-scientists like to argue about evolution [...]
Iomega ix2-200 Adds iSCSI, Sync To Dual-Drive SOHO NAS
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Enterprise storage, Terabyte home, Virtual Storage on 07. Oct, 2009 | View Comments
EMC’s low-end storage specialist, Iomega, today introduced a two-drive version of their iSCSI-capable StorCenter NAS line. The ix2-200 also adds native Time Machine support, data synchronization (including a QuickTransfer button), spin-down for its new low-power drives, and will soon boast VMware and Hyper-V compatibility certification. It also sports a more modern (and much less ugly) [...]
Tuning Lighttpd For Linux
Posted by Stephen in Personal on 29. Jun, 2009 | View Comments
As I mentioned on Friday, I’ve recently built a multi-server web hosting environment around lighttpd, MySQL, and Ubuntu Linux. Ironically, my lighttpd web server slowed to a crawl that very evening! It turns out that I had not properly tuned lighttpd to function in a Linux environment. I was surprised to find that the Ubuntu [...]
Setting Up a Multi-Server Web Hosting Environment
Posted by Stephen in Personal on 26. Jun, 2009 | View Comments
The last few weeks have been tough on my web servers. The release of iPhone OS 3.0 tripled my site traffic overnight as folks investigate the new Exchange integration features, and traffic to IT commentary site, Gestalt IT, which I also host, has been growing rapidly. Plus, Google just refreshed PageRank again, sending even more [...]
PowerPath To The Virtual People
Posted by Stephen in Computer history, Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage on 22. Apr, 2009 | View Comments
Hiding in the shadow of the huge VMware vSphere 4 announcement was a very interesting introduction by EMC: PowerPath/VE. As I mentioned in my post on storage changes in vSphere 4, PowerPath/VE plugs into the new pluggable storage architecture (PSA) found in vSphere 4 versions of ESX and takes over the decision-making and heavy-lifting tasks related to communicating with storage systems.D
