This week QNAP expanded their lineup to include the TS-x69 series of 1U and 2U rackmount NAS appliances with the four disk TS-469U and eight disk TS-869U respectively. QNAP is a company well known for building "low-end" NAS appliances from 2-8 disks and has really moved into the SMB market over the past few years. Traditional storage vendors such...
Lately I have done a few SSD benchmark sessions on some of today's popular SATA III solid state drives. One thing that I did not have is results of Anvil's Storage Utilities bechmarks for all of those reviews. I actually think Anvil's utilities represent one of the better, if not the most complete picture of solid state disk performane...
News recently is that Apple just announced a press event on 12 September 2012 which everyone thinks is going to be the big iPhone 5 launch among other products. I have to believe Apple just Osborned (past tense verb of Osborne for those wondering) their iPhone sales for the next month and a half (or longer.) For those wondering,...
Today we are looking at the Intel Xeon Processor E5-1650 which is perhaps the sweet spot for LGA 2011 Xeon processors. With 6 cores, 12 threads running at 3.2GHz base and 3.8GHz max 12MB of cache, the Intel Xeon Processor E5-1650 is a more than capable CPU for multi-threaded workloads. For those wondering, the LGA 2011 Xeon E5 series CPUs have...
Supermicro has just released a couple of Quad Xeon E5-4600 based motherboards. These boards are behemoth in size, much like quad AMD Opteron G34 motherboards, for obvious reasons. Packing Quad Intel Xeon E5-4600 CPU's, 32x DDR3 DIMM slots capable of up to 1TB ECC memory and a few expansion slots to boot makes these new Supermicro Quad Intel Xeon motherboards...
Western Digital released earnings that absolutely blew out analyst estimates this week. Analysts are expecting Seagate to follow suit next week. This makes a ton of sense. With the Western Digital - Hitachi GST merger and the Seagate Samsung merger, there are effectively three hard drive players with Toshiba being number three. The hard drive industry has essentially has...
Building upon last weeks piece regarding how to set up an Infiniband link using a Ubuntu 12.04 machine. That guide utilized two very low cost Mellanox MHEA28-XTC controllers which cost less than $50 each used. Today we are looking at the performance of the setup. One of the big drivers for using Infiniband is that it is a very...
One topic I get a lot of questions about is creating an All-in-One ESXi 5.0 machine with ZFS storage based on Illumian, Nexenta, and Solaris 11 Express all alongside guest operating systems. For those not familiar with the concept, the idea is simple, utilize what is arguably the best open storage subsystem very similar to what Oracle and NetApp...
I had not thought about this in awhile, but Solid State Drives (SSDs) are now less expensive than their hard drive counterparts. Sure, someone probably just did a bit of research and saw a SanDisk Extreme 240GB is $180 ($0.75/GB) while a 3TB Western Digital Red edition drive is $180 ($0.06/GB) and declared me insane. I would instead argue...
The SanDisk Extreme 240GB utilizes a LSI SandForce SF-2281 controller alongside Toggle NAND to achieve some fairly impressive performance. Inside the SanDisk Extreme is NAND from the Toshiba and SanDisk joint venture which puts SanDisk at a bit of an advantage since they have a secured supply of NAND which all vendors do not enjoy. SanDisk also enjoys a...