Scott Lowe recently linked to a VMware KB article entitled Storing swap files on VMFS when running virtual machines from NFS. The article (from 3/31/2008) is perhaps the latest word from VMware in the frustrating back-and-forth on whether placing an ESX VM’s swap on NFS is acceptable or not.
I’ve blogged before about the limits of NetApp’s A-SIS (Deduplication). In practical use, however, those limits can be even lower - here’s why:
Suppose, for example, that you have a FAS2050; the maximum size FlexVol that you can dedupe is 1 TB. If the volume has ever been larger than 1 TB and then [...]
We’re Never Content - Amazon announces a forthcoming CDN layered on top of S3 with “edge locations on three continents” - presumably North America, Europe and Asia - “in order to deliver your content from the most appropriate location.” Presumably Amazon is planning to use this in-house for their digital media sales, or possibly [...]
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: [...]
Performance Report: Multiprotocol Performance Test of VMware® ESX 3.5 on NetApp Storage Systems: A complementary whitepaper to VMware’s own work comparing Fibre Channel, iSCSI and NFS as storage protocols for VMware ESX. (Seen at blog.scottlowe.org.)
So I returned from a little five-day weekend to sunny Lake Chelan and the Columbia River to an RSS reader bursting at the seams with new posts. By far the best post was one later deleted:
Amazon Elastic Block Store goes live! (Yeah, that link’s dead - like I said, it was later deleted.) [...]
It’s summer, apparently everyone is on vacation, but, quietly:
NetApp releases Data ONTAP 7.3 GA!!! Note that it’s a GA, not GD release; release notes are on NOW. (Seen at blog.scottlowe.org.)
It’s been a while since I posted about my unhappiness with NetApp’s FAS2020. And while we’ve replaced our 2020 with a 2050, I still get a lot of traffic to those pages, and a few emailed questions from prospective or new 2020 owners asking about the so-called 8TB limit. Here’s a summary of [...]
Flash Forward - Jay Kidd, CTO of NetApp blogs that “NetApp is in the process of certifying enterprise-grade SSDs that you can use in our existing storage shelves.” No dates or pricing announced yet, of course, but he does make an excellent point about SSDs in storage arrays: “For the next few years, you [...]
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 dead - no they’re not kerfluffle.
NetApp finds NAS could mean ‘never accessed storage’ - “According to a USENIX presentation, 90% [...]