Who on earth can keep track of these definitions? Well, I for one, have made it my goal in life to figure out which of these definitions is bogus, and which are truthful, and what each actually means, and who can provide them.

Clustered File Systems – I think this might be one of the most misleading terms in technology. What exactly is a cluster? What exactly allows for a group of storage systems with a file system running on them to be considered a CFS? Well I guess you can technically call every HA deployment of a file system a “clustered file system”. For the purposes of this write up I am only going to consider solutions that tout themselves as Highly Available/High Performance File Systems.

Here is my list: ( In NO particular order)

• Lustre (Originally by Clustered File Systems, Inc, most recently purchased by SUN Microsystems.)
• GPFS (IBM)
• GFS (RedHat, formally Sistina)
• ONTap GX (NetApp, formally Spinakker)
• Polyserve (HP, formally Polyserve)
• PVFS2 (http://www.pvfs.org/)
• Exastor (Exanet)
• StorIQ (Isilon)
• Fusion (IBrix)
• Titan (BlueArc)
• Pantera (OnStor)
• ActiveScale (Panasas)

note: if you have a CFS of some nature and would like it to be considered for the next round of this write up please email me.

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Sometimes I wonder what the future of backup technology will be. I used to participate heavily in the Professional Services side of Backup and Recovery while at StorageTek. I stand by StorageTek’s product line as still the strongest in Tape technology. I’ll have to say that I was not impressed with the Systems Engineering at STK, and it is my understanding that SUN has fixed many of the problems I found myself in while part of STK’s Professional Services Group. I will start his entry off with an anecdote. Read the rest of this entry »

So the big news this week is the written legal battle between Network Appliance and Sun Microsystems. Looks like another round of big companies is going through the patent review process and lawsuits and counter-suits. It seems to be one of the hottest pieces of news among blogs most recently. I agree, somewhat, with Robin’s take on it, posted here. For the Executive look you can read Jonathan and Dave going back and forth in what is an almost public debate. Read the rest of this entry »

Al Franken, thank you for giving me the title for this blog entry. For those of you not familiar, Al Franken was a major comedic contributor to SNL (Saturday Night Live for those of you living in the dark ages) and that quote was a title of one of his more recent non-slanted liberal musings. This brings me to my topic of the day, Benchmarks and Benchmarking.

Coming front the world of clustered file systems, specSFS seems to be the standard benchmark that is easily available to access and is the mostly widely abused benchmark of all times. Now before the spec guys get upset with me, the problem isn’t with the specSFS tool-set, the problem is with the vendors who use it (I am guilty of this vendor deception personally).

For those of you not familiar with this benchmark, it is specifically used to test NAS IOPs performance. Some of the best performance ever seen by this benchmark was most recently released by Network Appliance, Inc. They were able to invent a solution that pushed the specSFS benchmark to the next level of performance, the 1,000,000 IOPs solution. Why this is irrelevant I will explain as simply as $. Actually, closer to $,$$$,$$$, please input any 7-8 figure dollar amount you wish, because that is the cost of 1,000,000 IOPs utilizing ONTap GX clustering configurations.

I am going to breakdown the top 5 producing solutions in this entry. This will be broken down into the following categories:

1. The solution being provided.
2. The Posted Result
   1. IOPs
   2. Latency
3. Load generation
   1. Number of Servers Required
   2. IOPs per load server
4. File System(s)
   1. Number of file systems (anything more then 1 is bad)
   2. IOPs per file system
5. Disk
   1. Number of Disk Controllers
   2. Number of Spindles
   3. Speed of Spindles
   4. IOPs per controller
   5. IOPs per Spindle
6. Relative Cost of Solution
   1. List pricing for components
   2. IOPs per $

Before I get going, I’m going to try my best to come up with list pricing costs for these solutions. I haven’t ever ordered these products and everyone of these vendors seem to have pretty complex configuration quoting tools. I’ll do my best!

THE LIST

(This list was based on specSFS results posted prior to 9/01/2007)

1. Network Appliance, Inc. – Data ONTAP GX System (24-node FAS6070)
2. EMC Corp. – Celerra NSX Cluster 8 X-Blade 60 (1 stdby) 2 DMX
3. Panasas, Inc. – ActiveScale storage cluster (60 DirectorBlades)
4. Exanet, Inc. – ExaStore EX600FC
5. BlueArc Corporation – BlueArc Titan 2200, 2-Node Active/Active Cluster

For those of you who aren’t interested in a LONG read, here is the summary in table format.

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I am amazed that no matter what national labs or universities do, IBM still owns the Top 500 space. I’ve spent a considerable amount of time walking the aisles of HPC data centers and studying what components people are using, and yet every few months, the HPC Top 500 still has IBM equipment in the Top 10 every time. I know that the Rackable and Terascala folks would love to bust into that group. I look forward to seeing some of the young cluster players come to light in the near future. In the meantime, my hat of to IBM who continues to astound me with continued excellence.

p.s. It was a BlueGene cluster at NCAR in Colorado that was able to predict the path of Katrina, even though no one listened.