The dual Meltdown and Spectre CPU flaws have caused a not entirely undue amount of FUD last week. The furor died down slightly as the news went from speculation to substantive analysis, but large concerns still remain with how this will impact organizations.
Chris Evans runs down how these kernel vulnerabilities will impact storage and HCI that depend on x86 CPUs to power performance. While higher utilization is always a concern, especially for often close to capacity HCI deployments, the bigger concern here may actually be increased latency. Due to the increased isolation to kernel memory tables added in the Meltdown patch, any storage related task is going to suffer from added latency, which will impact all storage requests across the board. This added latency makes it hard to judge the exact impact of patching Meltdown, so we’ll be looking for companies to release update benchmarks soon.
Chris Evans comments:
Read more at: The Impact of Meltdown/Spectre for Storage & HCI
