Storage performance management

I read the article "Storage performance management: 10 storage system performance tips" by Stephen Foskett. This article is about exactly what the title says, it gives us 10 suggestions of how to improve your storage systems performance. For starters there is no cure all to storage system problems.

• Tip 1 from the article was to “Freshen the firmware and drivers.” This tip is simple enough and most people update their drivers and firmware regularly anyway. There is usually an automated alert saying an update is necessary.
• Tip 2 was to “Question the queries” this tip basically says to adjust the I/O workload prior to a bottleneck occurring. In doing so the bottlenecks can be minimized and everything will run smoother.
• Tip 3 was “Break down backup bottlenecks.” This tip suggested using something called CDP, CDP is Continuous Data Protection, CDP backs up data as it is submitted rather than backing up everything at a designated time when most resources would be directed toward backing up files, this method instead uses very few resources to back up continuously and cuts back on backup bottlenecks.
• Tip 4, “Offload virtual machine I/O with VAAI this tip suggests using VMware vSphere 4.1 the end result of using this could be drastically reducing the I/O workload as well as less traffic over the SAN.
• Tip 5, “Balance virtual machine I/O with SIOC” this tip actually doesn’t accelerate performance according to the article, it just keeps everyone happy with the appearance of better performance.(I will attach a direct link to the article at the end of this entry that tip did not make any sense to me at all)
• Tip 6 was “Streamline the server side” this tip described how to use Network Interface Cards, HBAs, and RSS to accelerate performance by distributing processing across multiple cores.
• Tip 7, “Get active multipathing” this tip says that creating more paths to transfer data will improve the storage performance.
• Tip 8, “Deploy 8 Gbps Fibre Channel.” 8Gbps FC are switches that are faster than the more common 4 Gbps FC. 8 Gbps FC can handle twice as many I/O requests and they are twice as fast.
• Tip 9, “Employ 10 Gbps Ethernet.” 10 Gbps Ethernet is a faster ethernet cable that is relatively new and if the old ones are replaced with 10 GbEs then the transfer speeds would jump basically by 10.
• The 10th and final tip is to “Add cache.” This tip is a pretty good one since the more cache you have the more data can be transferred without halted operations and slowed systems.

Here is the link to the original article if you would like to read further and get the full explanation of these 10 great tips. 10 Tips