Storagebod's Blog

NetApp Reveal Cisco's Storage Incompetence

Peter Perrault, a NetApp marketing tweeted this link to some NetApp marketing fluff about about Cisco's use of NetApp storage; there is a very scarey statement in the PDF which if true makes me wonder about Cisco as a credible partner in the world of storage.

From the article;

"A few years ago, faulty disk drives on the development team’s underlying enterprise storage systems were a nuisance for Cisco IT, as Storage Domain Design Architect Rich Harper recalled. But, it wasn’t insurmountable until double-disk drive failures in the same parity stripe occurred twice in six months, resulting in the loss of hundreds of days of development work. While Harper readily acknowledged the drive issues were an industry problem that all vendors were experiencing, he admitted, “The experience still left a bad taste in our mouths.” "

Can anyone else see how scarey this is? A double-disk failure caused the loss of hundeds of days of development work? Have these people not heard of back-ups? Are Cisco still relying on parity to protect against data loss? Or is this just pure marketing hyperbole?

Look guys, RAID is not a substitute for back-ups! Snaps, clones and whatever else are not substitutes for back-ups. You need to get the data off the primary storage to another physical location/device. BackUp is not exciting but you need to do it.

Post Your Favourite FUD!!

Okay, let's get all the FUD out of our systems! What piece of FUD are you either

• Most proud of! What scurrilous piece of FUD have you manufactured to smear another vendor?
• Most amused by? What patently stupid thing has a vendor said to smear another vendor?
• Most shocked by?
• What piece of FUD actually turned out to be true?

This doesn't have to be storage specific but obviously I would prefer it to be so!

Storagebod's Performance Check

Every now and then I see a press release which really irritates me; all vendors have done it and often it is when they have a dig at a competitor! The only person who is allowed to have digs at vendors is me (okay and other users). This time, Pillar got on my nerves with an email which pointed me to this; you see EMC have decided not to take part in SPC for whatever reason and NetApp decided that they were going to go ahead and benchmark the Clariion anyway. I thought it was wrong at the time and if I'd been blogging, I'd have said so. And it's even more wrong now for Pillar to be using those figures now; especially since the CX3 is 'old technology'.

Obviously, the solution is for EMC to simply take part in SPC...wrong! The solution is for the other vendors to criticise and even suggest that EMC are hiding something; that's fair game! But to benchmark EMC kit and somehow suggest those figures are fair is cheap!

So, I have a suggestion; on an annual basis, a council of users chaired by myself will sit in a pub and fortified with several pints of Old Peculiar, we shall come up with a performance benchmark. It will change every year and will have the beauty that it reflects today's infrastructure and application design process. We will then calculate a budget; this will be decided by throwing three darts in the general vicinity of a dart boad; trying to multiply them together in our addled brains and probably sticking a few zeroes on the end for good measure.

The vendors will then have the task of specifying an array for the budget stated to perform the benchmark. After the council has sobered up, we will follow the best practise guide-lines to configure the arrays. The benchmark will then be run and the winner will be declared 'King of the Hill' for the next twelve months. This will give them the right to be mean to all other array vendors!

This was my idea!! But I have no patent and I won't sue!!

We've been talking at work about how to do SAN to NAS conversions; it's a pain and time-consuming. At the moment, we're just copying at the host level. But I've had an idea and you are all going to tell me that I'm nuts!!

As a great number of the NAS heads out there are either bastardised Linux or BSD; why not simply allow the NAS heads to natively mount the file-systems and then present them out as a share; in the background, copy them across to the NAS' native disk format. I'm sure you could get a NetApp head to run Veritas for example as some sort of guest-filesystems. I reckon if you were really, really clever; you could take snap of the SAN disk; mount the snap on the head, do the copy leaving the primary disk running and then do a reconciliation of the files which have changed once the bulk of the copying has been done.

This way you keep the migration traffic mostly off the network and at the SAN level.

Okay, it's a bit Heath Robinson and there needs to be some programming done but surely this could work. I really need a SAN/NAS migration appliance; someone please build one? Pretty please?

p.s And if someone has already patented this or done it!!? I'm really sorry!!

p.p.s And if someone tries it and looses all their data! Well I'm really, really, sorry!!