Henry Newman on Why Workloads Matter More Than IOPS

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Henry Newman, Seagate Government Technologies

Henry Newman, Seagate Government Technologies

Over at Enterprise Storage Forum, Henry Newman looks at why we should focus on how much work gets done rather than specifications as disk drives and SSDs get faster and faster. This is not a new rant for Henry, and in fact the importance of workflow over bandwidth or IOPs is the main theme at this year’s Mass Storage Systems and Technology Conference (MSST) coming up in May.

The goal is balanced systems, and the key to having a balanced system is understanding your workload from end to end. The MSST conference is going to have a number of talks that will explore the ins and outs of various workloads and how those workloads impact various storage systems. Just understanding what system calls are made from all of the applications from strace tells you only part of the story, as it does not provide an understanding of what is happening on the storage level. We once took on strace for all of the applications running on a system and then built a simulation of the combined set of traces and ran this against various storage systems. The results were very surprising for the customer and showed the potential for a significant improvement in workflow. If you want to better understand what the latest research and techniques that are being used to understand workflows and how that impacts system performance and systems architecture, I suggest you pack your bags and head to Santa Clara for MSST.”

Registration is now open for the 32ndInternational Conference on Massive Storage Systems and Technology (MSST 2016). As the premier conference for massive-scale storage systems, MSST offers designers and implementers, storage architects, researchers, and vendors an opportunity to share best practices and discuss building and securing the world’s largest storage systems for high-performance computing, web-scale systems, and enterprises.

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