The Internet is responsible for the demise of many “meatspace” industries, from magazine publishing to CD sales, but there are some things it’ll never do: No matter how much time you spend interacting online, meeting in person is something else entirely. I’m not trying to advocate a return to the old world of tech conferences and user groups. Rather, I envision a new breed of connected events that reinforce online communities with real face-to-face communication.

The Human Element

People used to read trade magazines and scour conference halls to uncover product and technology gems, but this kind of research is better done online today. The other day, a friend-of-a-friend tweeted a request to suggest “NAS storage in the $3k to $5k range.” Knowing I would have some suggestions, my friend retweeted the request and I fired back a list of suggestions. Since we were on Twitter, my reply included links to the companies that made the products in question. Back in the old days, this product search might have lasted weeks or months, but I bet jjx had her research done in hours.

EMC World airport bus interview: Karl Lewis of UofM from Stephen Foskett on Vimeo.

So why go to a trade show if not to discover products? It’s all about the people. Increasingly, trade events like EMC World and Storage Networking World are becoming venues to meet people who were previously mere online avatars. They are for building friendships, business development, and cementing real connection and community. A look at my recent trade-show videos on Vimeo will reveal that most of my own interaction is personal, and the relationships built there could never be forged online.

David Scammell talks SNW and SpiceWorks from Stephen Foskett on Vimeo.

The new people I have met, like Karl Lewis and David Scammell, will become part of my own community, and I will become part of theirs. We would have never met without the Internet (Karl recognized me from my blog, and David spotted me on Twitter), but we would never have become friends without real human interaction.

Devolving the Conference

Tech Field Day Overview (Short) from Stephen Foskett on Vimeo.

The same can be said of the Gestalt IT community. We were friendly before we met, but our interactions at Tech Field Day cemented a surprisingly strong bond, especially between the delegates and presenting vendor staff. We are much more a community now than before these events. This is the main reason we will continue the Field Day event series: It brings a new kind of community to life! This kind of interaction might have happened at old-school conferences, but the specific (some might say peculiar) nature of the Field Day (invite-only, independent, and blogger-centric) makes it unique.

Another event I really look forward to is Greg and VaNessa Duplessie’s BD Event. It’s like the Field Day in that it distills a single element from the old trade show days to its purest form. In this case it is the business-to-business back-channel discussion that gets the focus. The BD Event is all about business development, and every part of it is designed to foster the sharing of ideas and opportunities between business people. I love the concept, and I hope I will see a tremendous crowd at the Boston event next month!

Watch live video from The Cube LIVE from EMC World 2010 on Justin.tv

Even traditional conferences are changing. EMC World had a tremendous blogger lounge set up, including an amazing live video setup. SiliconAngle brought us “The Cube“, a live webcast that brought the social elements of the blogger lounge to a massive online audience. My hat is off to NiceFishFilms for their technical expertise, yet it was the human element, getting such diverse people together in the same place, that made it all work.

Stephen’s Stance

The Internet will certainly change many elements of the traditional trade show, but it will never kill the need for real interaction. I look forward to the next clever twist on the conference, complementing Gestalt IT’s Field Day, the BD Event, and The Cube, but do not worry that we will all some day remain in our secluded caves. We are social people, and nothing beats meeting someone face to face.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Nothing Beats Meeting In Person
Read more posts categorized as Events, Featured

Before Google could even take to the stage to announce their new “Google Storage for Developers” cloud storage offering in their I/O conference keynote, Amazon hit back with a new low-cost “Reduced Redundancy Storage” option for S3. The titans are at war, and cloud storage is the new battle ground. But what was really announced? And should you care?

Defining Durability

Amazon begins their RRS rollout with an apt discussion of durability. To quote:

Let’s define durability (with respect to an object stored in S3) as the probability that the object will remain intact and accessible after a period of one year. 100% durability would mean that there’s no possible way for the object to be lost, 90% durability would mean that there’s a 1-in-10 chance, and so forth.

I like this turn of phrase, and encourage other storage vendors to consider it as well. It’s especially appropriate for a discussion of public cloud storage, since the traditional SLA (“availability”) relies on many systems between data and application. There are many failure scenarios that can result in a loss of availability without any risk of data loss, and Amazon is wise to make the distinction here.

Also see Amazon CTO Werner Vogels’ discussion of S3 durability

Amazon claims that “the durability of an object stored in Amazon S3 is 99.999999999%. If you store 10,000 objects with us, on average we may lose one of them every 10 million years or so. This storage is designed in such a way that we can sustain the concurrent loss of data in two separate storage facilities.” That’s eleven nines – a Very Large Number. RRS changes this: “Objects stored using RRS have a durability of 99.99%, or four 9’s. If you store 10,000 objects with us, on average we may lose one of them every year. RRS is designed to sustain the loss of data in a single facility.” Eleven nines remains the default for data written to S3, but an API call can set the REDUCED_REDUNDANCY flag on demand.

The idea is that some data can be regenerated or simply requires less “durability”. The value for the customer is reduced cost: RRS is 1/3 cheaper than regular S3 storage at $0.10 per GB per month to start, a substantial discount designed to counter Google’s forthcoming offering.

Stephen’s Stance

Amazon S3 RRS is a risky move, but the company handled the announcement exactly right. Rather than focusing on the reduction in cost, they turned the spotlight to the built-in reliability of their existing offering. Yet it’s a fact that not all data is equal, and much could be stored with less durability and at a lower price, and Amazon’s new option enables this. The company also made the right move by making reduced-reliability an opt-in option. RRS is a good move for Amazon, and I expect competitors (Google, Rackspace, etc) to follow.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Amazon Redefines Durability with Reduced Reliability Storage (RRS)
Read more posts categorized as Cloud Computing, Storage

EMC’s Iomega unit today released the 12-drive rack-mount storage product we have all been waiting for. It was never a question of whether Iomega could produce such a beast: The EMC LifeLine software and Iomega hardware were definitely up for it. The question was always if EMC would direct Iomega to fill the gaping hole in their storage lineup between the 4-drive ix4-200r and the entry-business AX4 arrays. The new ix12-300r packs 12 drive bays, scaling from 4 TB all the way to 24 TB, and backs it with quad gigabit iSCSI, redundant power, and everything else the small data center needs.

Stepping Up

The ix12 is a big step up. Although they sold multi-drive RAID systems even before the EMC acquisition, this new device is unlike anything we’ve seen before from Iomega. This slim (2U) chassis is all drives up front, with 12 hot-swap slots full of 3.5″ SATA storage. Under the hood is a dual-core 3 GHz Intel Core2duo E8400 “Wolfdale” CPU, a major horsepower upgrade from the single-core Celeron in the ix4-200r. It also has double the memory (2 GB) compared to that 4-drive product.

If you’re concerned about performance after trying out a desktop ix4-200d, you needn’t worry. The desktop unit has a lowly 1.2 GHz Marvell 6281 and just 512 MB of RAM. While this might be enough for a desktop user, it could never handle the pounding of servers in a shared networked configuration. The ix4-200r, with its 3.2 GHz Intel Celeron D 352 “Cedar Mill“, offered much better performance even though its name was just one letter different. And the ix12’s CPU is three times faster still, though it remains a single-controller system.

More significant changes lurk around the back of the ix12. Dual redundant power supplies, a frequent request in this class, and variable-speed fans, surround four Ethernet ports. Each sports gigabit speed and the set supports Microsoft Windows MPIO, can be aggregated with 802.3ad, or used in VLAN configurations with up to 4 VLAN tags per port. The ix12 speaks just about every language, from NFS and SMB to AFP and iSCSI, and now adds WebDAV and DFS support, too.

A few limitations separate this new ix12 device from its enterprise-grade brothers, however. As noted, a single controller manages all access, so redundancy and parallel processing are limited. Although the ix12 sports 12 drive bays, it only has four SATA channels internally; each bay shares a channel with two others using SATA expanders. Don’t expect to push wire speed over all four Ethernet ports at once, even with all this newfound CPU power.

A Wall of Drives

Base ix12s ship with 4 drives installed, but we were disappointed to learn that additional drives must be purchased in 4-disk packs from Iomega. Although this decision is understandable, the ix series remains a holdout amid growing legions of bring-your-own-drive competitors. At least the company supports mixing and matching drive sizes, including 1 TB and 2 TB at present. We suspect that the unit uses the same reliable 5900 rpm Seagate Barracuda LP drives as the ix4-200d.

Iomega added a few tricks to the LifeLine software to take advantage of a possible 12 drives installed. First up is the addition of dual-parity RAID-6 for improved data protection. The company (and this reviewer) suggest this over RAID-5 once more than 5 drives are combined in one set. Don’t worry, though, because RAID configuration can be changed online and any unused drive can be used regardless of its location in the array. The ix12 also adds drive spindown, saving power when the RAID set isn’t in use.

Like the ix4, any portion of a RAID set can be carved out into an iSCSI LUN for Ethernet-connected hosts. Iomega claims that LUN provisioning times have improved with the added horsepower and software tweaks, and we hope this is true. A maximum of 256 LUNs can be configured in this way, though even 12 drives are unlikely to drive much performance to that many storage users.

Where to Use It?

Although not listed yet, Iomega promises that the ix12 will have a place on the Exchange ESRP, Windows Server and Hyper-V logo list, and VMware Compatibility Guide this month. It’s already the first Iomega product to be “EMC E-Lab Tested”, meaning it is on the EMC Support Matrix; this fact alone speaks volumes of EMC’s expectations for the unit. My own experience shows that Iomega iSCSI is fine for smaller VMware and Hyper-V deployments.

Clearly, the ix12 is a new kind of Iomega array. If the 200d and 200r were a sign that the company wanted to move out of the house, the ix12 is a demonstration that they have graduated. Starting at US $5,000, the ix12 is all business and its resume ought to impress in interviews. It can’t quite boast the scalability and redundancy of established arrays (including its brothers from EMC), but it ought to be an easy acquisition for companies looking for a little more storage here or there.

One is left with questions, though: How big will EMC let Iomega get? If 12 drives are acceptable, what about 24? Is SAS off limits? What about 10 Gigabit Ethernet and even Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) eventually? Can we dream of dual controllers? At some point, the Iomega lineup could even threaten the CLARiiON!

Then there is the competitive landscape. Iomega leapfrogged the 8-drive Data Robotics lineup and landed squarely in competition with the likes of the revitalized Overland Storage but at a much lower price. We also have Netgear, HP, Dell, and Promise, and there is an attractive D-Link box packing 15 drives and 10 GbE. Iomega also has to worry about its own big brother, the Dell/EMC AX4, starting around $12k. It’s a competitive market, and Iomega is in for a fight as even more vendors wake up to the possibilities in this market.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Iomega Graduates and Goes to Work with the ix12-300r
Read more posts categorized as Storage

Do you know me?

Visitors to the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) booth at Storage Networking World in Orlando were greeted by a strange symbol (pictured above). It was included in the FCIA  Fibre Channel roadmap presentation as well. The group even made identifying the symbol a requirement to enter their door prize drawing.

But what is the symbol exactly? I was amused to get some puzzled looks (and no correct answers) when I polled a number of industry insiders. One even asked about the symbol when I included it in a blog post about Microsoft’s lack of FCoE support.

I guess everything needs a symbol nowadays, and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is no exception. Yes, this is the FCIA’s new FCoE symbol.

Fibre Channel plus Ethernet equals FCoE

Breaking it down, we might recognize the unofficial but widespread symbol of Ethernet (glance at the back of your PC or the box your switch or router came in) in the background with a double-ended single-bladed arrow superimposed. That arrow is apparently the new symbol for non-Ethernet Fibre Channel (FC).

Aren’t you glad you asked?

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | FCoE Symbolism
Read more posts categorized as Storage

Ever since Microsoft and Intel declared that the combination of Windows and Nehalem could deliver over a million iSCSI IOPS, I’ve been curious about just how they did it. What black magic could push that many I/Os over a single Ethernet connection? And what was on the other end? Now Intel has revealed all in a whitepaper, and the results are surprising!

What iSCSI Did

Let’s review the test for a moment. In March, Microsoft and Intel demonstrated that the combination of Windows Server 2008 R2 and the Xeon 5500 could saturate a 10 Gb Ethernet link, pushing iSCSI throughput to wire speed. That’s 1,174 MB/s, right around the theoretical maximum of a ten-gigabit link, given a tiny bit of overhead. The pair reunited in January to show that this same combination could deliver an astonishing million I/O operations per second, too.

Both of these results are astonishing. Sure, many high-end Fibre Channel SANs and storage systems blast out gigabytes of data and millions of I/O operations every second, but these tests are much more focused. Benchmarks are perilous, but the folks at Microsoft and Intel devised a fairly clever and focused set. Rather than a “mine’s bigger” contest, the pair only needs to prove that iSCSI can play with the pros.

The side effect is a demonstration of the capabilities of Microsoft and Intel components. Microsoft showed off the capabilities of Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V, and their software iSCSI initiator, while Intel can brag about the Xeon 5500 server platform and X520-2 10 Gb Ethernet Server Adapter with their 82599EB controller. Your mileage may vary, but it is possible to construct a true storage monster on an average server budget.

Intel Inside

Let’s start by looking at the configuration of the local end of the tested configuration. I’m a storage guy so I think of it as the initiator, but you might say it’s the server, the client, or the host. Regardless, the system under test (SUT) is what was put under the microscope. The configuration was a common one: A high-end computer packing an Intel Xeon CPU and 82599-based 10 Gb Ethernet adapter. Most data centers have a machine or two just like this one.

Looking closely, we see that the test in question relied on the following key components:

• Intel’s “Shadycove” S5520SC workstation-class motherboard
• The Intel Xeon W5580 CPU (4 cores, 8 MB cache, 3.20 GHz)
• 24 GB of DDR3 RAM
• Intel “Niantic” 82599EB 10 Gb Ethernet controller
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 x64

This combination would set you back about $7,500 – $450 for the motherboard, $1,500 for the CPU, 6 2 GB DDR3 SDRAM modules at $80 each, $1,200 for the Intel X520 NIC, and $4,000 for an Enterprise copy of Windows Server 2008 R2. Not cheap, but not an exotic server either.

Initiate and Optimize

The secret to push the tested system to perform like it did is in the optimizations in the server platform, the NIC, and Windows Server itself.

• The Xeon 5500 processor series includes many enhancements:
  • An integrated memory controller allows for faster RAM access
  • QuickPath interconnect (QPI) replaces the old front-side bus and enhances I/O off the core
  • A new I/O subsystem with PCIe integrated into the CPU
  • MSI-X expands the number of interrupts a PCI device can use
  • New instructions for on-board CRC-32C decoding, speeding up iSCSI digest processing
• The 82599 Ethernet controller also includes enhanced capabilities:
  • VMDq maps I/O queues to multiple cores and virtual machines, reducing I/O bottlenecks
  • Offload of TCP segmentation and receive-side coalescing
  • Interestingly, it does not appear that VMDc/SR-IOV was employed in the test
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V are ready to use all of these features and more:
  • R2 uses multi-core CPUs more effectively in general
  • Receive-side scaling (RSS) spreads the I/O workload across all four Xeon cores
  • The iSCSI initiator now allows CRC digest offload (using the new Xeon command set)
  • Numerous “NUMA I/O” optimizations in the initiator
  • TCP/IP Nagle can be disabled in the registry
  • Hyper-V VMQ allows the network packets to be copied directly into the guest virtual machine’s memory

Whew! Put all of these optimizations in a blender and Hyper-V virtual machine iSCSI access will be twice as fast as before. No kidding!

Stay On Target

But we knew all of this back in January. We also saw that a Cisco Nexus 5020 switch was used to fan out to 10 software iSCSI targets. But until now there was no mention of what targets were used exactly.

The final footnotes in Intel’s whitepaper reveals that the storage backing the million IOPS test was none other than StarWind Software’s iSCSI SAN! It is unclear what led Microsoft and Intel to use this particular iSCSI target (the earlier throughput tests ran on NetApp filers), but it does speak to the quality of this product.

It is not clear how many disk drives were used, but I would guess that SSDs or ramdisks might have been employed to pull a million IOPS. Network optimizations are also not mentioned, though jumbo frames would not be a benefit in an IOPS test.

StarWind’s software runs on Microsoft Windows and creates a full-featured iSCSI target, complete with data mirroring, automatic failover and failback, replication, snapshots, and thin provisioning. The company prices their iSCSI SAN at $6,000 for two nodes and competes with the likes of DataCore and Open-E. But the StarWind solution seems at a glance to be more full-featured than these other offerings.

Try It Yourself!

I imagine many folks like me might be tempted to try to reproduce these results. More valuable would be a set of best practice guidelines for the deployment of software iSCSI in Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V environments. Given the relatively modest hardware involved, there should be nothing stopping us!

These test results also prompted me to get in touch with StarWind to try their iSCSI target software. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that they are currently offering free non-production licenses to VMware vExperts, VCPs, and VCIs as well as Microsoft MVPs, MCPs, and MCT Professionals. Many of my readers fall into one (or more) of those buckets, and I applaud the company for this offer. If only more companies realized the value in giving away test licenses to influencers and thought leaders!

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | How Did Microsoft and Intel Get 1 Million iSCSI IOPS?
Read more posts categorized as Server Virtualization, Storage

HP recently commissioned Tolly Group to benchmark their BladeSystem c7000 against the Cisco UCS 5100. The short report focuses on two results, and reads like so many competitive benchmarks in the IT industry: Tolly focuses on metrics that highlight the strength of HP’s solution and the weaknesses of Cisco’s. I do not dispute the accuracy of these results, and HP and Tolly are doing exactly what tech companies do. But what’s the real value of pinpoint maximum-performance benchmarks like this?

0-100-0

Automotive media like Car and Driver and Top Gear frequently test the maximum performance of cars, racing to 100 mph or beyond, sliding around a skidpad, and slamming on the brakes. These tests can be enlightening when it comes to high-performance cars, and the punishing 0-100-0 test is especially impressive. But what’s the point of hammering an economy car or pickup truck like this? Maximal acceleration and cornering are entirely irrelevant to buyers of commuter cars and work vehicles.

Even though a given test can be conducted, it may not be enlightening. The Tolly report demonstrates two key findings:

1. Although 4-blade configurations perform the same under maximum stress, Cisco UCS performance declines with 6 blades while HP’s remains steady.
2. When using a shared blade uplink, Cisco UCS performance fell by half.

These are not startling results. Cisco blades sometimes need to share one I/O channel, and this can’t match the performance of an HP blade with dedicated I/O. Would it shock you to learn that a one-gallon bucket requires twice as many trips to the well as one that holds two gallons? Does it shock anyone to learn that a V6-powered Toyota RAV4 accelerates quicker than a four cylinder Honda CR-V? HP’s c7000 is bigger than Cisco’s UCS and offers more I/O channels, so HP beats Cisco whenever larger configurations with more I/O are tested.

Innocent Benchmarks

Greta examines the marks on an 18th century cooper’s bench

I’ll leave the deeper commentary on blade performance to experts like Kevin Houston and Martin Macleod, but these maximum-utilization benchmarks are only half the story. I’m much more interested in how the different approaches to I/O impact everyday (20%-40% load) performance and how oversubscription impacts performance as more blades are installed and workloads are moved around. In automotive terms, I’d like to know how well a car handles in the snow or how economical it is with three or four passengers. These real-world scenarios are much more telling than a test of a few blades under 100% load!

Clearly, HP wanted to call attention to specific shortcomings of a competitor’s product, and it was wise to do so with objective numbers instead of mudslinging and name-calling. I hope that future tests and releases include real-world workloads and logical configurations, not the extreme situation used in this report. The same lesson applies to all tech companies: Simple, objective tests of maximum performance are welcome, but customers need many more metrics!

Note: Along with 9 other independent bloggers, I attended HP’s Blades Tech Day in Houston on February 25 and 26. Most of my travel and living expenses were paid for by HP, and the company provided a small gift bag (pictured here).

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Innocence, Fairness, and Technology Benchmarks
Read more posts categorized as Networking, Server Virtualization

My presence at Storage Expo NL may have been cursed, but my presentation went off without a hitch thanks to the creativity and flexibility of the VNU staff and Expo volunteers like Ilja Coolen. In my session, I talked about the shortcomings of traditional tiered storage as a way to advance the Noble Goals of Storage Management and proposed a solution: Although merely using different disk types will never deliver the goods, adding flash and cloud to an integrated, automated solution will be truly revolutionary. I look forward to the day when all of today’s buzz-worthy technologies (flash, cloud, thin provisioning, automated tiering, post-RAID) are mixed together to form a really revolutionary storage system.

I went ahead and recorded the entire presentation and posted it on Vimeo for anyone to see. But I just realized I never posted it here to my blog. So without further ado, I give you “Extreme Tiered Storage: Flash, Disk, and Cloud!”

Stephen Foskett on Extreme Tiered Storage from Stephen Foskett on Vimeo.

By the way, in case you were wondering, I used BoinxTV to create this video.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Extreme Tiered Storage: Flash, Disk, and Cloud
Read more posts categorized as Cloud Computing, Storage

iSCSI is as fast as your hardware can handle. How fast? Try 1,030,000 IOPS over a single 10 Gb Ethernet link!

In March, Microsoft and Intel demonstrated that the combination of Windows Server 2008 R2 and the Xeon 5500 could saturate a 10 GbE, pushing data throughput to wire speed. Today, they showed that this same combination can deliver an astonishing million I/O operations per second, too.

Microsoft and Intel demand “One Million IOPS!”

We’ve heard of science experiments dishing out millions of IOPS before. Texas Memory Systems even offers a 5 million IOPS monster! All of these are impressive, to be sure, but they are proof of concept designs for back-end storage, not SAN performance. Actually pulling a million IOPS across a network has required the use of multiple clients and Fibre Channel links.

The Microsoft/Intel demo demanded some creativity to be sure, but they pushed a million IOPS over a single Gigabit Ethernet link using a software initiator. That’s right, this was a single client with a single 10 GbE NIC pulling a million I/O operations from a SAN. Amusingly, it took many storage targets working together to actually service this kind of I/O demand!

Another thing to note is this was done with the software iSCSI stack in Windows Server 2008 R2, not some crazy iSCSI HBA hardware. Again, an iSCSI HBA would have trouble servicing this kind of I/O load, but an Intel Xeon 5500 has plenty of CPU horsepower to handle the task.

This bests the already-impressive 919,268 IOPS put up by an Emulex FCoE HBA earlier this week. It’s the equivalent of over 5,000 high-end enterprise disk drives and five times greater than the total database I/O operations of eBay.

So what’s the takeaway message? There are a few:

1. Performance is not an issue for iSCSI – Sure, not every iSCSI stack can handle a million IOPS, but the protocol is not the problem. iSCSI can saturate a 10 GbE link and deliver all the IOPS you might need.
2. Performance is not an issue for software – Today’s CPUs are crazy fast, and optimized software like the Windows Server 2008 R2 TCP/IP and iSCSI stacks can match or exceed the performance of specialized offload hardware.
3. Storage vendors need to step up their game – Whose storage array can service a million iSCSI IOPS? Raise your hands, please! I can’t hear you! Hello? Anyone there?
4. Fibre Channel and FCoE don’t rule performance – I don’t know of a Fibre Channel SAN that can push this kind of throughput or IOPS through a single link. Even FCoE over the same 10 GbE cable can’t quite do it. If they are to stay relevant, they had better come up with a compelling advantage over iSCSI!

Under The Hood

Microsoft and Intel passed a million IOPS with small blocks, but larger sizes still delivered solid performance

Looking at the release a bit closer, we see that this high IOPS limit was reached with 512 byte blocks, with 1k and larger blocks delivering much better throughput but decreasing IOPS. Typical FC HBAs can only reach 160,000 IOPS or so, a rate the iSCSI initiator could handle with large blocks and low CPU utilization.

A Xeon server fanned out through a Cisco Nexus switch to 10 iSCSI targets in the lab

The client side of the test was a quad-core 3.2 GHz Xeon 5580 server running Windows Server 2008 R2. It was connected with an Intel X520-2 10 Gb Ethernet Server Adapter using the 82599EB controller. A Cisco Nexus 5020 switch fanned this out to 10 servers running iSCSI target software. The IOPS measurement was done with the industry-standard IOMeter software.

Hyper-V performance matched the native number at higher block sizes

The team also benchmarked this configuration running Microsoft’s Hyper-V server virtualization hypervisor. Since Hyper-V leverages the Windows Server codebase, performance remained remarkably similar. Intel’s VMDq and Microsoft’s VMQ allowed guest operating systems to reach these performance levels, routing ten iSCSI targets to ten guest instances over virtual network links.

Update: Check out this Intel whitepaper on the test!

Dr. Evil/Ballmer mashup image from “The Big Deal“

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Microsoft and Intel Push One Million iSCSI IOPS
Read more posts categorized as Server Virtualization, Storage

Making a list? Who's naughty and who's nice?

Who’s naughty and who’s nice? The average computer geek of the last decade would have placed Microsoft atop the naughty list. The average corporate IT manager’s nice list probably wouldn’t have included EMC and Oracle. Yet Google, Apple, Sun, HP and even IBM don’t have this frequent negativity directed towards them. What’s the difference between naughty and nice when it comes to IT companies? I’ve heard complaints of the greed and arrogance of these companies, though their boosters would point out that it’s easy to envy the success of others.

But things are changing. Microsoft has a bona fide hit on their hands, with Windows 7, Xbox, and Bing re-introducing the company to new customers that don’t harbor old grudges. Inside corporate IT, the halo cast by VMware seems to highlight the re-energized EMC in much the same way. With their competition taking dents in the ongoing battles, Microsoft and EMC just don’t look so bad anymore.

Microsoft: Hearts and Minds

The blooms in many Microsoft competitors’ rose gardens seem to be fading. With “do no evil” Google only finding lucre in the filthy advertising business and the naughtiness of “evil as we wanna be” Apple peaking, Microsoft’s Internet and consumer efforts are starting to seem downright approachable. That’s one way to change your image: Wait for your competitors to catch up and your customers will catch on. The geek parade still loves Google and Apple, but their ambitious drive and massive revenue are distasteful to many.

Every time I write about Apple products, at least one credible geek has to call me out for being a fanboy. The core of their arguments seem to combine scorn for friendly interfaces and pretty hardware, a distaste for Apple’s huge profit margins, and a belief that the faithful wear Apple-tinted glasses when looking at alternatives. I guess Apple users look like a bunch of sissies to the more manly geeks in the audience.

In fact, it’s become something of a badge of pride to stick by Microsoft, even as the UNIX weenies and Apple-heads wander off. They ask “who’s got the most market share in desktops and servers?” Windows Vista’s appetite for hardware and unstable nature might have challenged them, but the quick, slick, solid Windows 7 has reaffirmed their faith. And they know that those who throw stones at Windows Server are living in the past: Ridiculous naming aside, Windows Server 2008 R2 is every bit as great in the data center as Windows 7 is on the desktop.

But there’s more to Microsoft than Windows. Even ardent Microsoft haters have to admit Bing is solid, functional, and even clever. Indeed, Microsoft has taken the search battle right to Google and is working hard to innovate past their rival. Xbox has a solid beachhead in the gaming world, challenging successful and innovative products from Nintendo and Sony. Azure puts a developer-friendly face on the nascent cloud computing market and is anything but a “me-too” to Amazon EC2 and VMware. Barring any major product or PR disasters, Microsoft is well on the way to renovating their sagging corporate image.

EMC: Keeping It Real

EMC is leaving the little storage market behind and doesn't look as big and scary in the larger IT world

What Microsoft is to average computer users, EMC is to enterprise data storage folks. No one denies that they make great products, and have dominated the market for two decades. Although they don’t have the massive share Microsoft has in the desktop OS market, no one comes close to EMC in enterprise storage. They spent the last decade steadily growing to control 25% of the market leaving a wealth of competitors fighting it out far below.

Through all this growth, however, EMC has never been loved by their customers. I’ve known literally dozens of IT shops who refused to buy from EMC, even though the sleazy sales tactics that turned them off (and indeed the sales reps themselves) are reportedly long gone from the company. Like Microsoft, EMC hasn’t softened its approach as much as their competitors have hardened theirs. With the market getting tougher, the tough guy doesn’t look so bad anymore.

I hear that things have improved inside the company, too. All giant corporations have their share of intrigue, politics, and dead weight, and EMC is certainly no exception. But the reports I hear from insiders are positive, and improving all the time. EMC is making some smart moves, giving acquisitions the independence to thrive and building revenue outside their enterprise storage base. Hiring great folks like Scott Lowe, Christopher Kusek, and Ed Saipetch doesn’t hurt, either.

Customers seem to be sensing a change, too. It’s hard to hate VMware, RSA, Legato, and the rest of EMC all at once, though some have grudges against two or three. EMC is successfully diversifying into other areas of information technology. Like Microsoft, EMC’s new customers never learned the old stereotypes. Now that they’re swimming in a much larger pond, EMC looks neither as big or as bad as it once did.

You Will Decide

Are EMC and Microsoft really turning the corner? We will all know in a few years. If the geeks of tomorrow no longer resent their success and hold past mistakes against them, both companies could enter a renaissance not only of credibility but of business success.

Santa Claus image: Public domain from Project Gutenberg

Gorilla image: public domain from Pearson Scott Foresman

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. |
Are Microsoft and EMC beginning a renaissance of geek respect?


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© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Are Microsoft and EMC beginning a renaissance of geek respect?
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How fast can iSCSI get?

“Maximizing Hyper-V iSCSI Performance with Microsoft and Intel” might sound like another “blah blah” marketing piece, but a little birdy tells me that this webcast will drop a bombshell about iSCSI performance.

Lots of storage and networking folks don’t give iSCSI and Microsoft the credit they deserve. “iSCSI is cheap and easy,” they say, “but real performance requires Fibre Channel.” Those of us who have an open mind about such things know that this is simply not the case. The fastest SAN I ever saw was based on iSCSI, and Microsoft demonstrated wire-speed iSCSI over 10 Gb Ethernet in March. I never saw a Fibre Channel SAN (even an 8 Gb/s one) push over a gigabyte per second over a single link!

Still, ask the average sysadmin and they will tell you that iSCSI isn’t for high performance applications. That’s why folks should tune in to this webcast, as Microsoft and Intel knock down another iSCSI performance myth. Note that even though Hyper-V is called out in the title and description, this discussion is really about Windows Server 2008 R2 and applies equally regardless of whether or not you use Microsoft’s hypervisor.

Watch this space for a summary of the news immediately following the announcement.

• What: Maximizing Hyper-V iSCSI Performance with Microsoft and Intel webcast
• When: Thursday, January 14, 2010 8:00 AM Pacific Time
• Where: MSEvents.Microsoft.com
• Who: Anyone interested in high-performance storage and server I/O

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. |
Microsoft and Intel Pushing iSCSI Performance Limits


This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you’d like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Microsoft and Intel Pushing iSCSI Performance Limits
Read more posts categorized as Server Virtualization, Storage