More from the storage anarchist
In my last blog post I responded to Barry Burke author of the Storage Anarchist blog. I was under the perhaps naive impression that Barry was an independent voice in the blogosphere. In fact, he's merely Storage Anarchist by night; by day he's the mild-mannered chief strategy officer for EMC's Symmetrix Products Group — a fact notable for its absence from Barry's blog. In my post, I observed that Barry had apparently picked his horse in the flash race and Chris Caldwell commented that "it would appear that not only has he chosen his horse, but that he's planted squarely on its back wearing an EMC jersey." Indeed.
While looking for some mention of his employment with EMC, I found this petard from Barry Burke chief strategy officer for EMC's Symmetrix Products Group:
And [the "enterprise" differentiation] does matter – recall this video of a Fishworks JBOD suffering a 100x impact on response times just because the guy yells at a drive. You wouldn't expect that to happen with an enterprise class disk drive, and with enterprise-class drives in an enterprise-class array, it won't.
Barry, we wondered the same thing so we got some time on what you'd consider an enterprise-class disk drive in an enterprise-class array from an enterprise-class vendor. The results were nearly identical (of course, measuring latency on other enterprise-class solutions isn't nearly as easy). It turns out drives don't like being shouted at (it's shock, not the traditional RV drives compensate for). That enterprise-class rig was not an EMC Symmetrix though I'd salivate over the opportunity to shout at one.