Very often, storage product users do not know what kind of performance numbers to expect in real operations. Why do storage vendors claim such great performance when measured by an industry accepted reference tool like IOmeter, but in production database applications are often very slow? The biggest difference comes from how the data is being read from the disk. Is it in sequential blocks or is it scattered in random blocks all over the drive? [...]

Last week I visited WHD2011 (World Hosting Day) in Rust, Germany. As usual there was plenty of interesting news and lots of ideas on how computing is going to develop in the next 10 years. But I want to mention something I saw there that is very practical and ready to deploy today. Often storage builders use external JBOD’s if they need a very high capacity system. Such solutions need a lot of rack space [...]