On Thu, 24 Feb 2000, Bennett Todd wrote:
Benchmarking is a place where NetApp could _really_ help us out. There may be some software limitation that makes this partly impractical, but it seems to me with just a few max-config servers and some load-generating software and systems, you could easily provide a performance-vs-cost curve for a given customer, for machines perfectly tuned to deliver the best price/performance
Look at the published SPEC results at:
http://www.spec.org/osg/sfs97/results/
then do some math with price quotes from NetApp or your VAR. As with most vendors, NetApp is no exception in charging a premium for the top-of- the-line model, the F760. As I've mentioned in another post, I went through this analysis, and since I needed gobs of ops, I bought two F740's instead of a single F760. For 100% more money, I got 100% more ops with a second F740, not 50% more ops with a single F760.
for their particular needs. The two keys bits would be flexible servers, where for benchmarking you could selectively use only some
I'm all for that. As a previous post again showed, I need more cache in my environment (amount of NVRAM seems sufficient). The F740 has 1/2 GB, no more, no less. A write-intensive development environment is apparently not the optimally-tuned "typical" configuration that NetApp uses to configure their one-size-fits-all filers.
Perhaps in the future NetApp could be a bit more flexible in the configurations available, and maybe offer "professional services" to monitor and tune a filer for a specific application.
Until next time...
Todd C. Merrill The Mathworks, Inc. 508-647-7000 x7792 3 Apple Hill Drive, Natick, MA 01760-2098 508-647-7001 FAX tmerrill@mathworks.com http://www.mathworks.com ---