Another week, another fistful of storage nouns comin' at ya like a breeze block to the frontal lobe

A concentrated storage blast has blown in after the Easter break, with substantial product announcements from Datrium, Nexenta and Rubrik. Other news from Intel, Nantero and Kingston was backed up with Huawei SPC-1 benchmark results, several funding events and exec moves. Grab yourself a cup of your favourite caffeinated or …

[Anonymous Coward]

How to double your IOPs

Get the system you're testing. Put artificial workload on it. Measure IOPs.

Get another system exactly the same. Put same workload on the second one. Measure IOPs. Lo and behold you've doubled your IOPs.

Like all synthetic benchmarks, unless they're showing you the exact workload you intend to use on the exact system you intend to buy, they have little value.

Playing Top Trumps with specs is not the right way to go about buying storage. How many people buy their cars based on the manufacturer's claimed top speed?

[Secta_Protecta]

Rubrik Polaris

So Rubrik continues its "stellar" growth by adding yet another product to its portfolio. I spent a short time working there and what I saw under the covers was a rush to add new products/functionality without stabilising what was already there, leading to data loss and/or corruption. I saw emails from customers demanding their money back due to these and other issues so I am very curious as to whether things have changed; until this is confirmed I'll remain cynical whenever this "unicorn" releases its latest blockbuster...

[sasov75098]

Xeon 28 Core 2.0GHz-16GT-UPI: The Ultimate Storage Spooler or a Parallelism Pipe Dream?

Right, you magnificent bastards. I'm speccing a new box to act as a primary host for a virtualised development and test environment, which essentially means running a few dozen VMs that are mostly idle, but all need to spin up at once without complaining.

I'm looking hard at one of those Xeon 28 Core 2.0GHz chips with the 16GT/s UPI https://serverorbit.com/cpus-and-processors/xeon-28-core/2-0ghz-16gt-upi. On paper, it's a core-packed beast for massive VM density. But my spidey-sense is tingling, and it's not just the 40 cups of coffee.

The Core vs. Clock Conundrum: For this kind of "idle-but-must-instantiate" workload, are we in "cores-over-clocks" territory, or is the 2.0GHz base clock going to be a painful anchor, making the entire system feel sluggish? Am I buying a car park for 28 Mini Metros instead of a garage for 8 Porsches?

The I/O Bottleneck Tango: This thing will be fronted by a proper all-flash array. With 28 cores potentially hammering the storage controllers, does the 16GT/s UPI become the unsung hero preventing a mutiny in the memory lanes, or is the real bottleneck just going to shift downstream to the PCIe lanes on the chipset?

The Real-World Vulture View: Has anyone actually deployed these specific chips for a similar "wide" VM farm? Did the core count deliver the glorious parallelism we're promised, or did it just give you 28 different contexts in which to observe latency?

In short: Is this a genuinely smart play for maximising idle-but-ready VM count, or am I about to learn an expensive lesson about Amdahl's Law the hard way?

Your cynicism is eagerly awaited.