Data Storage Leaders Introduce New Wares

louismg writes "Data storage giant EMC announced upgrades to their storage hardware family this morning, and claimed performance increases of 25% to 100%, with increased capacity and disk speeds. This comes two weeks after competitor BlueArc announced Titan, the world's biggest ever NAS box, which claims throughput of 5 Gbps and 256 terabytes in a single hardware file system. How much is enough, and as IT administrators, what is the answer to today's issues - improved hardware, or software?"

Comments

Seagate, too!

[morcheeba]

Also today, Seagate launched a family of server-class 2.5" drives sporting 10k rpm and an Ultra320 SCSI or Fibre Channel interface. No details on Seagate's web site yet, though.

And yet, strangely, 100% speed increase of broken

[Anonymous Coward]

...is still broken. My company is finishing up a particularly nasty lawsuit with EMC now over the crap that they "sold" us. I'd advise anyone in a position to make a purchase for their company to consider all the options before going with EMC. Their products are unfinished and unreliable. Ugh.

The price

[dtfinch]

BlueArc appears to charge about $100/gb for storage solutions, and claims that its price is less than its competitors. At first, this looks to me like an insanely high price because my last hard disk cost $0.88/gb. But after some thought to the other hardware involved, I figure I could build an almost equally capable solution for $8-$20/gb, not counting software development costs. But adding the cost of the room to hold it all, plus the insane electrical and air conditioning costs, $100/mb is starting to look fairly reasonable for those who really need what they offer, and need it soon.

Re:BS

[PurpleFloyd]

Your problem is because of Windows (or DOS, if you're even more of a masochist). It will tend to move the file in small chunks, so it goes something like this: read a little bit (maybe a few K) from disk, copy it to memory, seek head to new location, write that tiny amount back to the new location, then go back to the previous location and start over again with a new tiny chunk. As a result, your hard drive's heads are in transit more often than they're reading data, and speeds really suffer. Remember that old versions of DOS and Windows were designed to run on systems with very little memory; this strategy, while slow, also uses very little scratch space.

If you're using Linux and want to copy a lot of stuff from one place to another, you can use dd ('disk dump', designed for moving large files) and specify a blocksize of a few megs; this means that you will be moving data a few megs at a time, rather than a few K at a time - of course, this means that you have to use that much more memory. Also, I would imagine that Cygwin would allow you to use dd under Windows; another option is NTFS, where transfers from one directory to another on a single drive are nearly instantaneous. Of course, then you lose compatability; while FAT variants are understood by almost all OSes, you will have an unpleasant time trying to mount and use an NTFS volume from anything other than Windows. It's all about tradeoffs, but hopefully something here will help.