Podcasts

Ray Lucchesi, President of Silverton Consulting has created a series of podcasts on storage array performance. These were originally created for TechTarget.com and were originally available on their website. They are now available below for free download.

Lesson 1 Performance Fundamentals - Presentation (PDF 105.0 KiB)
Lesson 1 Performance Fundamentals - Podcast (10:27) (MP3 9.6 MiB)
SUMMARY: Understanding the types of available arrays and what the particular performance metrics of those arrays are, can help you gain a better understanding of how to optimize your storage operation. In this podcast with president of Silverton Consulting, Ray Lucchesi, you'll quickly learn the very technical merits of different types of disk. Ray uncovers throughput, seek times, capacity and other disk specs in a side-by-side comparison of disk classes. Ray also touches on disk caching and transfer speeds.

Lesson 2 Primary Performance Influencers - Presentation (PDF 66.9 KiB)
Lesson 2 Primary Performance Influencers - Podcast (8:35) (MP3 7.9 MiB)
SUMMARY: What can shatter your disk performance? President of Silverton Consulting Ray Lucchesi covers -- in technical detail -- where performance hits may strike. In this short podcast Lucchesi explains how caching functionality, RAID and replication can all impact I/O. Ray will also look at the subsystem features or options that have the largest impact on I/O performance. A good deal of this podcast is devoted to response time improvements and throughput.

Lesson 3 Secondary Performance Influencers - Presentation (PDF 75.9 KiB)
Lesson 3 Secondary Performance Influencers - Podcast (11:20) (MP3 10.4 MiB)
SUMMARY: There are more subtle performance inhibitors in the array and network that you may not be aware of. In lesson three of SearchStorage.com's array performance podcast series, Ray Lucchesi exposes you to these hard to quantify areas which can impact I/O performance. Once you have optimized the primary performance drivers, you might want to look at these secondary points that can be used to produce additional performance gains and insights into your workload performance.

Lesson 4 Final Thoughts - Presentation (PDF 133.3 KiB)
Lesson 4 Final Thoughts - Podcast (9:56) (MP3 9.1 MiB)
SUMMARY: In the last part of the array performance podcast series, Ray Lucchesi discusses tools used to monitor subsystem performance and what you should be looking for. Also, Ray will guide you through when you should make performance decisions and choices. Finally Ray talks about subsystem performance benchmarks, current issues and places to go for more performance information.