How to provide access to shared data using Linux based servers and cluster file system? In this post we are going to present quick and painless way to configure the whole environment that will consist of a few servers using Linux Debian Squeeze and another one with DSS V6 as a storage provider. To be more interesting we are going to present also an alternative way to manage DSS V6.

There are plenty of benchmarking tools available but storage professionals mostly use IOmeter. Unfortunately IOmeter is a little tricky to use. You really need to read the user manual first. I have frequently seen users trying to run IOmeter tests without success. Being human, most of us hate to read the manual and with IOmeter this can lead to problems. I hope this short post will help you to get the wanted results. First off, [...]

I guess that all of us know that caching the data usually increase the performance, but I worried if all of us are aware about risk that caching the data provides and how to minimize them? That’s the reason why I decided to write this short article about it. Therefore, let us analyze the situation when we are using device (HDD) connected to our OS via iSCSI. Server that provides this device as LU through [...]

I am not kidding. We were getting queries about the performance of our latest DSS V6 build 4786. So I needed to quickly set up a performance benchmark. It took me about 5 minutes to set one up with a Fibre Channel volume connected to a VMware ESXi 4.1.0 host. My test server has a 4Gb dual-port FC HBA, so in order to get maximum performance I configured a round-robin Multipath. Then I ran IOmeter [...]

Most present tape drives include a function called hardware compression. This makes available data compression to the magnetic tape by a drive. In many cases this feature may prove very useful. The hardware compression is much faster than a software compression because as opposed to the software compression it does not use a computer processor which draws from resources. Also it is transparent to the operating system and data is compressed “on the fly”. Usually [...]

Fortunately in Linux  in contrast to our lives we don’t need to choose one path, we are able to choose all paths! In this article, you can find simple description about configuring multipath under Linux for iSCSI (internet Small Computer System Interface) and FC (Fibre Channel) environments. At the very beginning we must configure iSCSI or FC target. We can use trial version of Open-E DSS V6 software. If we decide to use iSCSI target [...]

There is  plenty of talk about Bonding and Multipath IO, but it is very difficult to get solid information about either one. Typically what documentation can be found is very bulky and the most important practical questions go unanswered. As a result the following questions are often heard: When should I use bonding and when should I use multipath? I was expecting better throughput with bonding, why am I not seeing this? My RAID array [...]