Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Responses on the post related to WAN optimization and Infineta systems

I have got many responses on this post.  Some were asking more clarifications on what I meant by deduplication efficiency across restarts.  Some questioned that how I can make a statement that there is no persistence data across restarts in Infineta solution.  By the way, I did not make a statement. To clarify further, I don't know whether the solution has capability of keeping data intact across power cycles.  I just want to say for record that, it is only my reading based on the statement that the performance of the solution  will be in multiples of gigabits/sec, up to 10Gbps.  I guess we will come to know eventually when the product is out.

One response suggested that it is very well be that the solution might have multiple hard drives, with each drive hanging on different hardware bus,  to achieve multigiga bit  performance. Though it seems like a possibility and I am not sure whether it is practical.

One possibility is that multiple blades are combined into one solution with each blade working almost independently as far as Dedup is concerned.  This type of solution is suitable for deployments having multiple servers that need to be synchronized (for backup, replication and others) where content of  server or set of servers being optimized by different blades.  If there are few servers than the blades, then this type of solution capacity can't be utilized completely in those specific deployments.

One response was asking on whether I know of any performance benchmarking criteria to evaluate WAN optimization solutions. I am not aware of any standards or defacto standards. If I come across any, I will certainly post them in this blog.

3 comments:

Anand said...

Hi ,
Thanks for all the posts , its been very informative .
Can you please help me in understand why with hard disk storage , we cannot achieve Multi-gig throughput ?
Assume i have a Quad Core CPU with 4Gig DDR3 RAM + 300+GB HDD for other reports storage etc ... Can't i achive 2Gbps throughput on this ?
Thanks,
Anand

Srini said...

My understanding is that most of the HDDs transfer speed is limited to 600Mbps and at the most 1Gbps.

Do you know of any HDDs that have transfer speeds of 2Gbps?

Srini

Anand said...

Thanks for your reply .

Please correct me if my understanding of the WAN Optimization product is wrong .

The Appliance sits in the Forward /Routing path looking at packets and restructring them for the WAN , mabbe with hardware support . All of these has to be done in the RAM . As far as i understand (Linux Kernel in Specific ) all this would be in the RAM .
Where would HDD come in this path ?
Kindly excuse me if i m wrong .