Posts by Mr. Twinkee

Quick as a flash: ATTO joins 32Gbit/s Fibre Channel bandwagon

Re: Why bother with FC?

I think Ethernet works well for many, but the low latency provided by Fibre Channel excels just in what the article says, Flash Storage. When you have nodes connected via Ethernet and not using RDMA you have long lags in latency. Fibre Channel allows users to share data at extremely low latency meaning you can move more data faster. I have seen users abandon Ethernet connected storage after learning that 10Gb did not even equal 8Gb Fibre! Now with 25/40/50GbE we may see some comparisons to 32Gb FC. I would bet that 32Gb FC is still faster than 25/40/50 in the native Ethernet but may be closer to being on par if RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) is in place...but that is still a ways out from adoption giving Fibre Channel time to move toward 128Gb more quickly than anyone expected... and should threaten 100GbE.

Now, I know its not for everyone.. but FC is far from dead. I just upgraded a client who had problems with a 2 year old DAS system with nodes connected via Ethernet... simple vMotions took up to 6 hours with SAS drives... turning his old (using existing storage) system into a SAN with FC allowed live migrations and vMotion to complete in minutes Happy customer.

StorPool CEO: 'We do not need another storage product'

Re: Someone's gotta test

And to add to that, SDS companies are also putting together reference architectures that they bake to make sure the solution is rock solid. Nexenta has done that with their MetroHA and qualified specific hardware from Dell and Supermicro. I understand that this is in order to help support the solution vs. having a support team that has to know about any and all commodity hardware in the world. They also require to have Nexenta install the solution, being that it is a complex active/active fully redundant data center solution don't want someone forgetting to plug in a cable and claim that the solution is balls awful when it was their staff that did the install.

There is a trade-off between solution costs, installation costs and support costs depending on what type of "open" system you want to create or implement.

Software defined? No no no, it's poorly defined storage (and why Primary Data is different)

Re: Server-based storage ?

When has storage not been server-based?! Well there are dedicated arrays, JBODs and JBOF storage that have no operating system for users, no on-board compute for processing applications, so there have been and are a lot of non-server-based storage products out there.