Hu's Blog

Technical Deep Dive’s Nigel Poulton responded to my post and Twitter conversation on the relevance of Tier 1 controllers with a post of his own. In his blog, Nigel writes that he believes SSDs have changed the game and the need for Tier 1 controllers. He ends his post with this summary:

Management efficiency is a key part of storage efficiency. The explosion of data and data types cannot be managed if we continue to take a piecemeal approach to storage management.

The choice of a storage system can have a major impact on the efficiency of an application. There are storage features that can enable applications to run faster and use less CPU and memory; they go beyond the performance features of faster buses, cache, and drives. These features require communication with the application, which enables [...]

Data Protection has two roles. One is the protection of data, and the other is to protect the application that uses that data.

UPDATE: Since this post was first published, I was challenged on a performance chart that I showed. Since I did not have the details, I took this post down until I could verify the test parameters with the owner of the performance chart. Unfortunately, the owner would not release these details so I left the post [...]

This is a continuation of my series on storage efficiencies, looking specifically at storage performance efficiencies. Here are just a few considerations.

As noted in previous posts, capacity efficiency has two dimensions: allocation efficiency and utilization efficiency.

If you Google storage efficiencies, eventually you will get a Wikipedia definition, which describes storage efficiency as “the ability to store and manage data that consumes the least amount of space with little or no impact on performance, resulting in a lower total operational cost.”  Wikipedia also references the SNIA definition, which notes:

In response to my last blog, Jon Toigo was kind enough to post a training piece that he wrote last year, reminding us that capacity is only one part of storage efficiency.

The greatest tool for storage efficiency is storage virtualization, which enables the extension of other storage efficiency tools like tiering and thin provisioning to existing storage systems that do not have that capability. It also reduces operational costs by providing a common pool of dynamic shared resources under a common set of management tools.