Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Archives for January 2010

FC vs NFS vs iSCSI

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I was just reading the excellent whitepaper that NetApp just published. The paper is titled “VMware vSphere multiprotocol performance comparison using FC, iSCSI and NFS“. I guess the title says enough and I don’t need to explain why it is important to read this one.

I read the paper twice so far. Something that stood out for me is the following graph:

I would have expected better performance from iSCSI+Jumbo Frames, and most certainly not less performance than iSCSI without Jumbo Frames. Although it is a minimal decrease it is something that you will need to be aware off. I do however feel that the decrease in CPU overhead is more than enough to justify the small decrease in performance.

Read the report, it is worth your time.

Vote Now!

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Eric Siebert has created a new poll to update his top 20 bloggers list. As many of you know I had the honor to be on the number one spot for the last three updates. Hopefully I will be part of the top 3 again, but the competition is huge. People like Chad Sakac, Scott Lowe, Scott Drummonds, Alan Renouf and Jason Boche(just to name a few) have a great reputation and have published amazing articles over the last 6 months or longer.  Looking back at the past 6 months(since the last voting) my top articles in terms of unique views were:

Let the games begin, Start the voting now!

Nehalem and memory config

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Just a short article for today, or should I call it a tip. Take your memory configuration into account for Nehalem processors. There’s a sweet spot in terms of performance which might just make a difference. Read this article on Scott’s blog or this article on Anandtech where they did measure the difference in performance. Again it is not a huge difference, but when combining workloads it might just be that little extra you were looking for.