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Archive for July, 2008

Catch-up Links, 7/9/2008

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There’s nothing like a long summer weekend followed by an on-site consultant to keep you from updating your blog. But on the bright side, I didn’t have to link to the notebook SSDs are deadno they’re not kerfluffle.

  • NetApp finds NAS could mean ‘never accessed storage’ – “According to a USENIX presentation, 90% of data on NetApp’s networked storage systems was untouched over a 3-month period, raising the issue of whether it would be better placed on cheaper storage.” I would find some irony in that cheaper storage being tape.
  • zfs un-benchmarking – “Our rationale for testing was to finally get some numbers that we can provide to users/customers about real zfs performance. There is a huge amount of (largely uncontested) information (emanating mainly from Sun and its agents) that zfs is a very fast file system. We want to test this, on real, live hardware, and report. Well, we can’t do the latter due to Sun’s licensing, but we did do the former. Paraphrasing Mark Twain: ‘Rumors of zfs’s performance have been greatly exaggerated.’” When Joe Landman blogs about performance, I take what he has to say seriously, but given the stability problems he notes, I wonder if – as he suggests – that driver issues are a factor here, and we’re not seeing a generic ZFS issue. (Seen at InsideHPC.)
  • Self-protecting archive for SharePoint – “A new archiving product from BridgeHead Software automatically moves older, infrequently-accessed SharePoint items to cheaper archive media and cuts down the SharePoint backup burden.” HSM for SharePoint, apparently? Sounds interesting.
  • Since NFSv4 is Stateful It Must Be Less Robust, Right? – “The short answer is no.” Interesting summary of how locking works under NFSv4; although I haven’t used NFSv4, this sounds like a massive improvement over previous versions – can I get the time that I spent debugging locking problems on Linux NFS servers back now?
  • Storage Opens Up – Sun releases new JBODs and upgrades Thumper’s hardware. Given that I heard rumors of the Thumper expansion shelves (J4500) maybe a year ago, I’m surprised it took them so long to come out. And is it just me, or do the J4200 and J4400 look a little like someone else’s boxes rebranded?

Written by Andy

July 10th, 2008 at 11:47 am

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Hotlinks, 7/1/2008

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  • The Hitz report – Robin Harris at StorageMojo on the Sun-NetApp lawsuit:

    NetApp’s biggest misperception is that WAFL is somehow central to the success they are enjoying today. That was true about 10 years ago. Guys, your average F500 CIO today could care less about WAFL.

    NetApp is growing because they offer a compelling value proposition of quality products, relevant services and worldwide support. WAFL certainly supports that, but as NetApp execs note much of their recent success is due to the integration software that NetApp now offers.

    WAFL is a small piece of the picture. Sun could copy it line for line and still not have a quarter of what NetApp offers.

    NetApp faces challenges. Storage commoditization threatens all vendors traditional 60% gross margins. The GX integration is problematic and the bottom line benefit uncertain. EMC’s move into cloud file services is a clever flanking strategy.

    An interesting opinion summed up nicely, I think.

  • Saving and Restoring ZFS Snapshots to and from Amazon S3 – A ZFS to S3 workaround for the lack of persistent storage on EC2.

Written by Andy

July 1st, 2008 at 12:08 pm

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