Few Sysadmins really understand what’s happening in the storage interface of their systems, yet there’s a lot of talk about SSDs with wide-ranging IOPS figures along with case studies of how these have helped solve system slowdowns. The big question is: “How do you determine what your storage bottleneck is, and even whether or not one exists at all?”
Tom Coughlin and I discovered a very low level of understanding of this issue when we performed the IOPS survey late last year that we documented in our report: How Many IOPS do You Really Need? A disconcerting number of respondents gave replies that Continue reading “How to Locate a Storage Bottleneck”