- 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: Usable capacity, particularly on LUNs if you follow the 100% space reservation recommendation. (Being a NetApp admin these days, I can’t really comment on what he writes about HP – it’s been a long time since I’ve touched that StorageWorks stuff – and I can only repeat what I’ve heard others say about EMC.) More Chuck on this here.
- How to License Windows VMs in a Non Microsoft Virtual Environment: Why Windows Server 2008 Datacenter Edition may be the best choice. (Seen at blog.scottlowe.org.)
- Welcome – My friend, NetApp’s Vaughan Stewart: Chad Sakac highlights some flaws in NetApp’s TR-3697 (“Performance Report: Multiprotocol Performance Test of VMware® ESX 3.5 on NetApp Storage Systems”):
What’s the scoop with:
* 4K/8K IO size only
* 2Gbps FC
* You guys have “throughput/IOPs” shown only in relative, not in absolute.
* 84 144GB drives with 16 VMs driving the IOMeter workloads with * 10GB of data each on them = 1.3% utilization (rounding up!).
Archive for the ‘microsoft’ tag
Links, 8/30/2008: Usable space, licensing Windows, multiprotocol VMware storage
Suggested Reading, 6/3/2008, Evening Edition
- SkyNet Lives! (aka EC2 @ SmugMug) – Blog post about how SmugMug uses (and doesn’t use) Amazon Web Services; I found the comment that EC2 Persistent Storage “isn’t performant enough” intriguing – I’ll be interested to see what its performance characteristics are once it’s available to the public. Excerpt from the post: “Let me be very clear here: I really don’t want to operate datacenters anymore despite the fact that we’re pretty good at it. It’s a necessary evil because we’re an Internet company, but our mission is to be the best photo sharing site. We’d rather spend our time giving our customers great service and writing great software rather than managing physical hardware. I’d rather have my awesome Ops team interacting with software remotely for 100% of their duties (and mostly just watching software like SkyNet do its thing). We’ll get there – I’m confident of that – we’re just not there yet.” (Seen at the Amazon Web Services Blog.)
- Rough Type: Microsoft to put “many millions” of servers in cloud
– Nicholas Carr reports on Microsoft’s cloud plans. My thoughts: Does anyone see a latency problem with the following – think of the speed of light in glass, or the AWS Blog post mentioned above and its comments about locating services in the same cloud , or why SmugMug still runs some of its own servers: “We’re taking everything we do at the server level, and saying that we will have a service that mirrors that exactly. The simplest one of those is to say, okay, I can run Exchange on premise, or I can connect up to it as a service. But even at the BizTalk level, we’ll have BizTalk Services. For SQL, we’ll have SQL Server Data Services, and so you can connect up, build the database. It will be hosted in our cloud with the big, big data center, and geo-distributed automatically. This is kind of fascinating because it’s getting us to think about data centers at a scale that never existed before. Literally today we have, in our data center, many hundreds of thousands of servers, and in the future we’ll have many millions of those servers.”