Nutanix has updated most of their appliances to G6 hardware using Intel Skylake processor family. Previous G5 Nutanix appliances were using Intel Broadwell processor family. This has caused some confusion when it comes to processor performance, the newer processors typically run at lower clock speed, so quick conclusion would be that the newer processor would be slower.
Tag: performance
First experiments with Nutanix AHV Turbo.
One of the improvements that came along with Nutanix AOS 5.5 was IO path optimization feature called “AHV Turbo”.
While the marketing department at Nutanix might have fallen asleep and woken up in 1990s with god-awful name like this, it is actually a GOOD feature. Every time I hear word “Turbo” in IT related matters, it just reminds me of my first ever PC, a 286 with a “Turbo” button, which supposedly boosted performance by increasing frequency from 8 Mhz to 12 Mhz, but did actually do diddly-squat 🙂
Continue reading “First experiments with Nutanix AHV Turbo.”
Death of 10k SAS drive?
There is a famous quote by Mark Twain “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated”, and despite claims made by All Flash disk array manufactures, this quote still holds true for 10 k SAS drives when comparing only cost per gigabyte. SSD drives have been and are still more costly per gigabyte than their spinning ancestors 10k SAS drives.
Performance testing pitfalls with artificial load generators
Since I’ve now written few posts about NetApp, it is time to switch gears. While I am quite noob with Nutanix, I’d like share something about Nutanix as well.
I received a demo unit from Nutanix a while go. One way to get familiar with a product is to put some load on to it and see what happens.
Because I am going to show some performance figures and Nutanix EULA forbids publishing benchmarking results, I am not going to disclose the configuration of the Nutanix box. This way performance figures are just numbers, not benchmarking results and hopefully I am not breaching the EULA. Furthermore without disclosing all the workload parameters and the configuration of the box, metrics such as “IOPS” and “Latency” are just numbers without relevance and should not be used in any comparisons with other products. Continue reading “Performance testing pitfalls with artificial load generators”
NetApp AFF and Advanced Drive Partition V2, part 4
In the final instalment of this series, I’ll have a look at AFF setups that have about the same usable capacity, but are built out of different set of SSD drives. Both are using ADPv2 to maximize usable capacity.
This is also the point where things get little bit hairy.
In previous posts I was comparing apples to apples in hardware terms, the only difference was version of ADP used, solutions under comparison were equal in terms of total cost and performance. Since ADPv2 is more efficient, you can lower $/GB without altering total cost or performance, making AFF more cost effiecient, you get more bang for your buck.
This time I am comparing apples to oranges in hardware terms. Using different hardware components makes comparison more complex, it is not just about usable capacity, different hardware has also different performance characteristics and total cost. I am not going to touch performance aspect too much as it would overcomplicate the comparison.
Continue reading “NetApp AFF and Advanced Drive Partition V2, part 4”
DontPokeThePolarBear 