A few years back, I wrote an immensely-popular series of blog posts outlining the four things that were holding storage system performance back, and the ways to fix them. At the time, I created some presentation content to go along with these posts, and even considered pulling them into a white paper, but nothing came of that. Now, however, I'm pleased to announce that my Four … [Read more...] about The Four Horsemen of Storage System Performance Are Coming To Life!
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The Four Horsemen of Storage System Performance: Get Smart
Why do some data storage solutions perform better than others? What tradeoffs are made for economy and how do they affect the system as a whole? These questions can be puzzling, but there are core truths that are difficult to avoid. Mechanical disk drives can only move a certain amount of data. RAM caching can improve performance, but only until it runs out. I/O channels can be … [Read more...] about The Four Horsemen of Storage System Performance: Get Smart
EMC VFCache (aka “Project Lightning”) Is One Small Step, But an Important One
EMC will today unveil a new product, and will no doubt attract a great deal of press. The modest technical capabilities of VFCache 1.0 limit its use case, but the announcement is big news, since it marks EMCs first foray into the hot server-attached storage market. EMC VFCache is a Simple Read Cache I was not pre-briefed on this product, and I'm not all that thrilled at the … [Read more...] about EMC VFCache (aka “Project Lightning”) Is One Small Step, But an Important One
The Four Horsemen of Storage System Performance: I/O As a Chain of Bottlenecks
Why do some data storage solutions perform better than others? What tradeoffs are made for economy and how do they affect the system as a whole? These questions can be puzzling, but there are core truths that are difficult to avoid. Mechanical disk drives can only move a certain amount of data. RAM caching can improve performance, but only until it runs out. I/O channels can be … [Read more...] about The Four Horsemen of Storage System Performance: I/O As a Chain of Bottlenecks
The Four Horsemen of Storage System Performance: Never Enough Cache
Why do some data storage solutions perform better than others? What tradeoffs are made for economy and how do they affect the system as a whole? These questions can be puzzling, but there are core truths that are difficult to avoid. Mechanical disk drives can only move a certain amount of data. RAM caching can improve performance, but only until it runs out. I/O channels can be … [Read more...] about The Four Horsemen of Storage System Performance: Never Enough Cache