There’s been a lot of noise from the storage industry about flash recently - in particular, noise from EMC and Sun, both of whom recently announced storage products using flash, EMC in January and Sun earlier this month. Below are my thoughts on what EMC and Sun are doing, as well as what NetApp [...]
Chuck’s Blog: Vendor Differentiation Through Thought Leadership - (Yeah, that title made me gag, too.) Excerpt: “Sun came out loud and strong recently with characteristic unbridled enthusiasm. But, in classic Sun fashion, they missed the point entirely. It’s not just the flash drives (they’re just components, right?) it’s what you can do with them [...]
I just finished reading a paper presented at FAST ‘08 from the University of Wisconsin, Madison (including the first and senior authors) and NetApp: Parity Lost and Parity Regained. The paper discusses the concept of parity pollution, where, in the words of the authors, “corrupt data in one block of a stripe spreads to [...]
VMware has just released a paper entitled Comparison of Storage Protocol Performance (seen at Scale the Mind and blog.scottlowe.org); maybe this will help deflate some of the too-often repeated speculation that NFS is too slow for VMware ESX.
poptart> version
NetApp Release 7.2.4L1: Wed Nov 21 00:49:33 PST 2007
poptart> aggr add aggr0 11
Aggregate size 8.48 TB exceeds limit 7.00 TB
aggr add: Can not add specified disks to the aggregate because the aggregate size limit for this system type would be exceeded.
I’ve recently bumped into a couple painful limits of Data ONTAP. The first is the widely-known 16TB limit on aggregate size - with each day, it’s increasingly stunning to me that they haven’t increased this yet: 16TB is big, but it just isn’t that big any more. Just as painful is the much [...]