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!
spindles
The Four Horsemen of Storage System Performance: The Rule of Spindles
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: The Rule of Spindles
Turning the Page on RAID
This is part of an ongoing series of longer articles I will be posting every Sunday as part of an experiment in offering more in-depth content. It has been the core technology behind the storage industry since day one, but the sun is setting on traditional RAID technology. After two decades of refinement and fragmentation, we are abandoning the core concepts of disk-centric … [Read more...] about Turning the Page on RAID