Your Usable Capacity May Vary - Chuck conducts a thought deployment comparing EMC, HP and NetApp usable space for a 120 disk Exchange deployment. And while he glosses over a couple perhaps non-minor issues (RAID-5 vs RAID-DP and whether EMC’s snapshots are adequately performant), he does hit one of NetApp’s weak spots dead on: [...]
VM HA - service console networking, isolation behavior - and other “under the covers stuff” - An overview of how VMware ESX’s High Availability works under the hood - making it much more apparent to me how important file locking is to HA’s functioning. (I’d love to see an overview of how file locking [...]
Blocks & Files: Now HP contributes HPC file system to open source - “HP has contributed its Tru64 UNIX Advanced File System (AdvFS) source code to the open source community, meaning Linux.” It’s been a long time since I’ve used AdvFS (the last time I used Tru64 was in 2003 or so), but it [...]
Red Hat adopts KVM: what happens to Xen now? - I work in a VMware ESX shop right now (other than all those Solaris Zones and FreeBSD Jails and OpenVZ VEs, that is) - no Xen or KVM. However, given the serious pain in the butt that timekeeping is in Linux guests on ESX, [...]
HP servers to get flash memory I/O boost - It looks like SSDs will become a common option on server hardware; the real issue will be how to adapt your operating system/file system/application to use them optimally.
BlueArc’s Titanic benchmark holed - A storage vendor using a non-real-world configuration to optimize benchmark results? Really? [...]