Understanding the accumulation of data
The Tech Field Day events I organize generate a massive amount of HD video content, and moving half a terabyte or more of data is a real issue. We had been using luggable desktop drives from Western Digital and Seagate, but preferred a smaller, lighter, USB bus-powered portable solution. The Seagate Expansion Portable USB drive we bought this week packs an amazing 1 TB of capacity, but our experience with the product was mixed at best.
Why do some data storage solutions perform better than others? Mechanical performance, RAM caching, I/O capacity, and the intelligence of the system all have a part to play. Today we examine the rule of spindles: Adding more disk spindles is generally more effective than using faster spindles.
I’ve long been critical of poorly-executed performance comparisons and the “fastest is always best” mentality behind them. But, although it sounds inconsistent, I still love reading the performance “comparos” in Car & Driver, and I am committed to the belief that the enterprise IT world needs lab tests and performance comparisons.
STEC may not have been quite ready to reveal their next-generation ZeusRAM solid-state disk (SSD), but they are demonstrating it anyway at EMC World in Boston this week. The ZeusRAM is a fundamentally different animal from the existing ZeusIOPS drive in one critical way: Rather than using flash memory for primary data storage, the ZeusRAM uses DRAM. This improves reliability and longevity and ought to raise the bar on performance as well.
The external hard disk drive market is incredibly hot right now, but it’s also ultra-competitive. The latest trend is dockable multi-function drives that are friendlier to use and offer advanced features like video playback. Most docks rely on USB 2.0, but Seagate just dropped a bomb on the industry with a simple twist: They moved the intelligence outside the case, repackaging the standard internal SATA connector as GoFlex, an external link to a variety of docks and adapters.
Robocopy is the best tool to move data between NTFS filesystems but was never very quick. Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, and later versions include a new version of Robocopy with performance tweaks including multi-threading that speed things up dramatically.
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!
HP recently commissioned Tolly 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: Tolly 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?
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.
“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.
We’re taking my Building Virtual Infrastructure presentation to Columbus Ohio at the end of the month. Cool! I live in Ohio, and don’t get much opportunity to speak at events here. There’s also Backup Central Live! with W. Curtis Preston the next day, if you want to go to both!
I’ve always loved my Wi-Fi iPad, but the Verizon LTE iPad (third-generation) is too awesome to overlook. Apart from the “retina” display and voice dictation, the killer app is unlocked roaming on just about any carrier network. Yes, you can use your Verizon iPad Verizon iPad on AT&T, Vodafone, or even Verizon!
The mobile phone network landscape is incredible confusing. I pulled together the following overview to help myself make sense of it, and I thought it might benefit my readers, too.
I don’t get much chance to read for pleasure, but two things I’ve been reading recently spurred my imagination. After reliving the advent of modern transportation in the solid non-fiction Jet Age by Sam Howe Verhovek, I stumbled upon two pieces of speculative fiction from an unlikely source that predated everything presented there.
Even though I grew up on the other side of the great baseball divide, I have always loved going to New York City. Next week, I return again, but this time I’m bringing a whole new event to the city: This is the first time the New York audience gets to see my Building Virtual Infrastructure presentation!
I’m really thrilled about the improvements Microsoft is making to the core SMB protocol in Windows Server 2012. But it won’t really matter if nobody but Microsoft supports the new protocol. So I like to call out to all the enterprise storage vendors: Let me hear your support for SMB3.0!
Microsoft is about to release the third major revision to their ubiquitous network storage protocol, SMB. Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V 3 will really highlight this technology, and I predict it will transform the way people think about networked storage for Windows systems. But SMB 3 is big in another way, too: there are tons of new features, and not all will be implemented by everyone.
If you’ve traveled much, you’ve probably run across “unlocked” mobile phones and devices. If you own an Android or iPhone smart phone, you probably also heard about “jailbreaking”. It seems like lots of people are confused about these two things, so I decided to write down a quick post explaining them.
IBM has really stepped up their game this year, and they will highlight all this at their upcoming storage technology conference, Edge2012. I’m really looking forward to seeing what IBM Edge is all about, and I’ll be attending and speaking at the event in June.
I am thrilled to return to speak at Interop next week, though not so much about returning to Las Vegas for the third time already this year. This time around, I’ll be on two Interop panel discussions in Mike Fratto’s storage track. If you will be at Interop and would like to meet up, let [...]