IT Dog getting down and dirty today because that’s what it is going to
take to deal with the dirty world of “vendor lock-in.” There is
really no way to dress this up and make it smell nice because it just stinks
and although I would roll in something this nasty down at the dog park, I
wouldn’t want you to have to live with the smell.
I read an excellent article by Chris Mellor at The Register discussing the
need to develop a standard for the server flash-storage array interface and
it really got me thinking about the vendor lock in issue.
“What is EMC up to with Project Lightning?”
We all are kind of waiting to find that out now aren’t we? EMC
announced Project Lightning as their foray into the server side flash
business, putting it sites on the nice people at FusionI/O, STEC and others.
I am wagging my tail to see EMC recogn... (more)
For years, the solution to IO bottlenecks has been pretty consistent: (1) add
spindles to decrease seek time and increase throughput, and (2) add as much
RAM as you can so your filesystems and applications can cache hot data and
avoid disk access entirely.
These brute-force attempts to gain performance are inherently flawed and
costly. The price of increasing the number of disks in an array adds up
quick, to say nothing of the investment in additional JBODs when you run out
of slots in your array. And although the cost of consumer-grade memory has
fallen, relying upon RAM for... (more)
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of your IT
manager or to take up cache against a sea of data. With apologies to Bill
Shakespeare, the IT Dog is discussing two different cache write policies:
write through and write back. Let me take a run at telling you what they are,
why they are different and what you need to think about when you decide what
policy to use.
Cache Write Through
This is the easier to explain and understand of the two policies discussed
here. Cache write through is like having your cake and eating it too. Data is
written into cache ... (more)
Dr Dog Says “You Need More RAM In Your Cache Diet”
Well, I am not really a doctor, but I play one on TV. You may remember (if
you are old enough) that line from the 1986 Vicks-44 TV commercial. Anyway,
while I may not be a real doctor, I can certainly tell you about why you need
more RAM in you cache diet.
“I Think My Cache Diet Is Great”
If you were happily running your IT system but needed some additional
performance, chances are you turned to some kind of SSD caching solution to
improve performance at a lower cost point than adding more servers or
storage. You went on what I a... (more)
File System Alignment for SSDs
There are many techniques and methods that can be used to tune an IT system
to improve overall system performance. SSD caching is widely being used as
a low cost, easy to implement method to quickly increase performance with
little or no impact on existing operations. One thing that needs to be
considered when choosing SSD caching is how to configure a file system to
maximize the performance increase SSD caching provides.
Operating Systems and Block Size
In the past few years, the sector size of HDDs has increased from 512 bytes
to 4k bytes. Relat... (more)
Peter Velikin has 12 years of experience creating new markets and commercializing products in multiple high tech industries. Prior to VeloBit, he was VP Marketing at Zmags, a SaaS-based digital content platform for e-commerce and mobile devices, where he managed all aspects of marketing, product management, and business development. Prior to that, Peter was Director of Product and Market Strategy at PTC, responsible for PTC’s publishing, content management, and services solutions. Prior to PTC, Peter was at EMC Corporation, where he held roles in product management, business development, and engineering program management. 
Amit Gupta
Tim Ober
Stefano Bellasio
Ben Johnson
Ben McCormack
Colin Ritchie
Mario Blandini
Vaibhaw Pandey
Slavik Markovich
