Category: SAN

  • Sustained power outages in the datacenter

    Ask any child about a power outage, and you can tell it is a pretty exciting thing. Flashlights. Candles. The whole bit. The excitement is an unexplainable reaction to an inconvenient, if not frustrating event when seen through the eyes of adulthood. When you are responsible for a datacenter of any size, there is no…

  • A look at FVP 2.0’s new features in a production environment

    I love a good benchmark as much as the next guy. But success in the datacenter is not solely predicated on the results of a synthetic benchmark, especially those that do not reflect a real workload. This was the primary motivation in upgrading my production environment to FVP 2.0 as quickly as possible. After plenty…

  • Observations of PernixData FVP in a production environment

    Since my last post, "Accelerating storage using PernixData’s FVP. A perspective from customer #0001" I’ve had a number of people ask me questions on what type of improvements I’ve seen with FVP.  Well, let’s take a look at how it is performing. The cluster I’ve applied FVP to is dedicated for the purpose of compiling…

  • Accelerating storage using PernixData’s FVP. A perspective from customer #0001

    Recently, I described in "Hunting down unnecessary I/O before you buy that next storage solution" the efforts around addressing "technical debt" that was contributing to unnecessary I/O. The goal was to get better performance out of my storage infrastructure. It’s been a worthwhile endeavor that I would recommend to anyone, but at the end of…

  • Iometer. As good as you want to make it.

    Most know Iometer as the go-to synthetic I/O measuring tool used to simulate real workload conditions. Well, somewhere, somehow, someone forgot the latter part of that sentence, which is why it ends up being so misused and abused.  How many of us have seen a storage solution delivering 6 figure IOPS using Iometer, only to…

  • Hunting down unnecessary I/O before you buy that next storage solution

    Are legacy processes and workflows sabotaging your storage performance? If you are on the verge of committing good money for more IOPS, or lower latency, it might be worth taking a look at what is sucking up all of those I/Os. In my previous posts about improving the performance of our virtualized code compiling systems,…

  • Vroom! Scaling up Virtual Machines in vSphere to meet performance requirements–Part 2

    In my original post, Scaling up Virtual Machines in vSphere to meet performance requirements, I described a unique need for the Software Development Team to have a lot of horsepower to improve the speed of their already virtualized code compiling systems.  My plan of attack was simple.  Address the CPU bound systems with more powerful…

  • Diagnosing a failed iSCSI switch interconnect in a vSphere environment

    The beauty of a well constructed, highly redundant environment is that if a single point fails, systems should continue to operate without issue.  Sometimes knowing what exactly failed is more challenging than it first appears.  This was what I ran into recently, and wanted to share what happened, how it was diagnosed, and ultimately corrected.…

  • Multipathing in vSphere with the Dell EqualLogic Multipathing Extension Module (MEM)

    There is a lot to be said about the Dell EqualLogic Multipathing Extension Module (MEM) for vSphere.  One is that it is an impressive component that without a doubt will improve the performance of your vSphere environment.  The other is that it often not installed by organizations large and small.  This probably stems from a…

  • Dell EqualLogic’s newest Host Integration Tools for Linux (v1.1)

      It was just last September that I wrote about Using the Dell EqualLogic HIT for Linux (HIT/LE) Version 1.0.  At the time, the HIT/LE was beginning to play an important role in how we housed large volumes of data, and I wanted to share with others what I learned in the process.  While it…