You're spot on ... again! Every time I engage with a customer about his Cloud initiative, I first verify my customer ability to be flexible and agile, then I verify their processes and make recommendations. There is a lot of education here obviously. Only once the customer fully understands the concepts of Cloud and agrees to change his mindset and his processes then we can talk technology eventually. It is People, Process and Technology ... In that order with People being my highest priority. In his keynote, Pat Gelsinger introduced the idea of Brave IT. This exactly my feeling when I talk to customers trying to drive innovations for their wealth and growth. This is also exhausting because you're sometimes facing walls of status-quo ... Never mind, path to the Cloud is a journey, we will get there anyway :) Rgds, Didier

Hi Vaughn. Would that be feasible the performance engineers post the IOmeter Configuration Files (.ICF) they used to benchmark this environment? They can be recreated from the report though, but that would be great if that is available online... Thx, Didier

Count me in! Got awesome customers who might be happy to share their storage workload profiles. Thanks for the freebie. I hope you can deliver to Belgium :)

Am I reading that correctly... You guys gave away a VNXe... OMG that's definitely more valuable than the regular goodies :)

This is awesome guys! Keep them coming... Just one quick remark, I would love to see the episodes in an higher resolution. Cheers, Didier

I had the same issue once. Since then I always recommend customers to format with a 8MB block size whatever the datatstore size is. And something very important, keep it consistent across the datastores for many reasons, several cited in above comments... For those who don't understand interactions between block size, file size and sub block, there is a good blog post available at http://wp.me/pvGaC-wP (DeinosCloud) Rgds, Didier

Wouldn't that be great if storage vendors come out with a standard management protocol to exchange information about storage status, health, perf, etc. of their devices with any compatible clients such vSphere or other storage devices too? Networking industry have standards like SNMP, IGMP. I expect storage industry can make it as well, no!? Rgds, Didier

Anyone has a link to benchmark tests? I'm curious how this rackable 'PC' with a lot of disks does perform, especially the IOPS you can get out of it :) Thx, Didier

Excellent spirit Chad! And to anyone who has some spare CPU cycles to give away, World Community Grid (www.worldcommunitygrid.org) is another way to fight against those nasty diseases!

Good to hear you are fine now. Keep up posted if your excellent articles.

Oops look like this blog does't like brackets... @Dave Mc You could tweak down the VMs monopolizing storage I/O by setting a registry key that will decrease the queue depth. i.e. for LSI FC add the following reg key: HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Lsi_fc\Parameters\Device\MaximumTargetQueueDepth ,0x40 (64 decimal) 64 is the default, test with 32 for instance... /MAXTAGS=nnn added to Driver Parameters is a common one but not recognized by all vendors... Rgds, Didier

@Dave Mc You could tweak down the VMs monopolizing storage I/O by setting a registry key that will decrease the queue depth. i.e. for LSI FC add the following reg key: HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Lsi_fc\Parameters\Device\ DWORD ,0x40 (64 decimal) 64 is the default, test with 32 for instance... DWORD is a common one but not recognized by all vendors... Rgds, Didier

My thought is that current disks, with moving parts, are the last bastion we have (had!) to take down before going to infiniband. As usual the former technology pays for the new one, thus regular disk as we know them, still have some years to live before completely phasing out. Let see what will happen in 2010 :)