Posts tagged "latency"

While most customers immediately understand how the magic of Oracle’s Hybrid Columnar Compression, intelligent storage servers and flash memory make Exadata uniquely powerful against home-grown database systems, some people think that Exalogic is nothing more than a bunch of x86 servers, a storage appliance and an InfiniBand (IB) network, built into a single rack.

After all, isn’t this exactly what the High Performance Computing (HPC) world has been doing for decades?

On the surface, this may be true. And some people tried exactly that: They tried to put together their own version of Exalogic, but then they discover there’s a lot more to building a system than buying hardware and assembling it together. IT is not Ikea.

Why is that so? Could it be there’s more going on behind the scenes than merely putting together a bunch of servers, a storage array and an InfiniBand network into a rack? Let’s explore some of the special sauce that makes Exalogic unique and un-copyable, so you can save yourself from your next 6- to 12-month science project that distracts you from doing real work that adds value to your company.

This is a long article, but I hope you’ll still find it interesting to read. Let me know if you want me to break down future long articles into multiple parts instead.

One of the most frequently asked questions around ZFS is: “How can I improve ZFS performance?”.

This is not to say that ZFS performance would be bad. ZFS can be a very fast file system. ZFS is mostly self-tuning and the inherent nature of the algorithms behind ZFS help you reach better performance than most RAID-controllers and RAID-boxes - but without the expensive “controller” part.

Most of the ZFS performance problems that I see are rooted in incorrect assumptions about the hardware, or just unrealistic expectations of the laws of physics.

So let’s look at ten ways to easily improve ZFS performance that everyone can implement without being a ZFS expert.