Recent press reports about a bidding war for 3PAR bring into focus the expanding need for enterprise class data storage subsystems.  What exactly is enterprise storage? Defining enterprise storage is frought with problems but I will take a shot.  Enterprise class data storage has: Enhanced reliability, high availability and serviceability – meaning it hardly ever [...]

There have been a number of Microsoft ESRP submissions this past quarter, especially in the over 5K mailbox category and they now total 12 submissions in this category alone. The above chart is one or a series of charts from our recent StorInt(tm) dispatch on Exchange performance.   This chart displays an Exchange email counterpart [...]

Micron just announced a new SSD drive based on their 34nm SLC NAND technology with some pretty impressive performance numbers.  They used an independent organization, Calypso SSD testing, to supply the performance numbers: Random Read 44,000 IO/sec Random Writes 16,000 IO/sec Sequential Read 360MB/sec Sequential Write 255MB/sec Even more impressive considering this performance was generated using [...]

We have discussed other scale out NAS products on the market such as Symantec’s FileStore, IBRIX reborn as HP networked storage, and why SO/CFS, why now (scale out/cluster file systems) in previous posts but haven’t talked about IBM’s highend scale out NAS (SONAS) product before. There was an announcement yesterday of a new SONAS version so thought it [...]

The above chart on SPECsfs(R) 2008 results was discussed in our latest performance dispatch that went out to SCI’s newsletter subscribers last month.  We have described Apple’s great CIFS ORT performance in previous newsletters but here I would like to talk about NetApp’s CIFS ORT results. NetApp had three new CIFS submissions published this past [...]

A couple of weeks ago SNIA just released a new version of their SSSI (SSD) performance test specification for public comment. Not sure if this is the first version out for public comment or not but I discussed a prior version in a presentation I did for SNW last October and I have blogged before [...]

The chart shown here reflects information from a SCI StorInt(tm) dispatch on the latest Storage Performance Council benchmark performance results and depicts the top IO operations done per second per installed drive for SPC-1 and SPC-1/E submissions.  This particular storage performance  metric is one of the harder ones to game.  For example, adding more drives to [...]

Well after last months performance reversals and revelations we now return to the more typical review of the latest Exchange Solution Review Program (ESRP 3.0) for Exchange 2010 results.  Microsoft’s new Exchange 2010 has substantially changed the efficiency and effectiveness of Exchange database I/O.  This will necessitate a new round of ESRP results for all [...]