Stop stroking your …

Nov 11

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A few days after I wrote about the performance benchmark bag of tricks, EMC was the first to fire the first salvo at NetApp’s SPECSfs2008 world records on NFS IOPS.

EMC is obviously using all its ammo to deflate NetApp chest thumping act, with Storagezilla‘s blog. Mark Twomey,  who is the alter ego of Storagezilla posted several observations about NetApp apparent use of disk short stroking to artificially boost its performance numbers. This puts NetApp against the wall, with Alex MacDonald (who incidentally is SNIA NFSv4 co-chairman) of the office of the CTO responding hard to Storagezilla’s observation.

The news of this appeared in The Register. Read all about it.

With no letting up, the article also mentioned EMC Isilon’s CTO, Rob Pegler, adding more fuel to the fire.

I spoke about short stroking as some of the tricks used to gain better numbers in benchmark. And I also mentioned that these numbers have little use to the real work and I would like to add that these numbers are just there for marketing reasons. So, for you readers out there, benchmark is really not big of a deal.

Have a great weekend!

About cfheoh

I am a technology blogger with 20 years of IT experience. I write heavily on technologies related to storage networking and data management because that is my area of interest and expertise. I introduce technologies with the objectives to get readers to *know the facts*, and use that knowledge to cut through the marketing hypes, FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) and other fancy stuff. Only then, there will be progress. I am involved in SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) and presently the Chairman of SNIA Malaysia. My day job is to run 2 companies - Storage Networking Academy and ZedFS Systems. Storage Networking Academy provides open-technology courses in storage networking (foundation to advanced) as well as Cloud Computing. We strives to ensure vendor-neutrality as much as we can in our offerings. At ZedFS Systems, we offer both storage infrastructure and software solution called Zed OpenStorage. We developed Zed OpenStorage based on the Solaris kernel, ZFS file system and DTrace storage analytics.

Posted on November 11, 2011, in EMC, Filesystems, NetApp, NFS, Performance Benchmark and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. Leave a comment.

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