Posts by lyceus

Ten exabytes wedged into a rather large box by Cleversafe

back of napkin calculations

10 exabytes is enough storage for around 500,000 years worth of HD (5Mb/s) video. That's a lot of pr0n.

TfL wheels out digital bus info upgrade

Now that is a good idea!

Off-the-shelf servers spar with million-dollar storage arrays

Well read - not

Perhaps Chad should re-read the quote from Nexenta's CEO? It doesn't say that Nexenta handled 50% of the load, it says "50% of the verticals". A very cleverly written post that seems to say one thing but actually doesn't!

Marketing at it's very finest.

So what can't you do with VMware's VSA?

Other VSA options...

Why would anyone choose this over HP's P4000 VSA, which has a list price of around $5000, and does support iSCSI? Plus has a bunch of additional features not present in any respect in the VMware VSA?

Unless VMware expect customers to pay a premium for being able to manage the VSA within vCenter (?)...

I would also expect SMBs to consider OpenFiler with a support package, which is even better value, and has even more features too...

Seagate's terabyte platters make it the densest of the lot

... should be the same

Seek time should be the same - it is defined by the rotational speed of the drive, the diameter of the platter, and the speed of the actuator motor (plus a few other minor things). Since all these factors will be the same, the seek time will be the same (give or take a tenth of a millisecond).

What may change is the peak/average read/write speeds. That depends on the areal density and the number of platters/heads.

The cost of not deduping

De-dupe is done at block level

De-duplication is a great tool for eliminating the storage cost for exact copies of files. However, as soon as the content is changed in typical office files, they cannot be de-duplicated at the block level. For example, a Word document that has had one character changed somewhere in it will add an "edited by" tag at the top of the document, thereby "pushing" all the content down a few bytes, and therefore all the blocks will not match up for de-dupe.

God help anyone who believes they can achieve anything over 15% storage reduction in a typical environment. The exception might be a large Exchange 2010 installation.