The next version of Microsoft Windows Server includes integrated data deduplication technology. Microsoft is positioning this as a boon for server virtualization and claims it has very little performance impact. But how exactly does Microsoft's de-duplication technology work? Introducing Windows 8 Deduplication Let's make one thing clear right from the start: Microsoft … [Read more...] about Microsoft Adds Data Deduplication to NTFS in Windows 8
I/O
What is WRITE_SAME? Green Eggs and Ham!
One of the sticky wickets that holds back thin provisioning is the need to communicate when capacity is no longer needed. Enterprise storage arrays can reclaim zeroed pages, but writing all those zeros can really fill up an I/O queue. This is where WRITE_SAME comes into the picture. This is a really terrible name. It's all-capital letters and has an underscore in the … [Read more...] about What is WRITE_SAME? Green Eggs and Ham!
Zero Page Reclaim: Savior of Thin Provisioning?
In the previous post, I talked about how the Drobo uses metadata monitoring to solve the telephone game and make de-allocation possible. But that approach is challenging in complex enterprise environments. Instead, most enterprise arrays use a complex chain of semaphores to interpret signals from the connected hosts about the capacity that can be un-provisioned. On the … [Read more...] about Zero Page Reclaim: Savior of Thin Provisioning?
Innocence, Fairness, and Technology Benchmarks
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. I do not dispute the accuracy of these results, and HP and Tolly are … [Read more...] about Innocence, Fairness, and Technology Benchmarks