By Calvin Zito, aka @HPStorageGuy
I mentioned recently that we have a new blog platform. As we've migrated to the new platform, one thing that initially came up as a problem was having re-directs in place if you were trying to find a post from the old platform - those old URLs are supposed to redirect to this new platform.
That got me thinking and digging into every article we've posted on the blog since we kicked off this blog back in January 2008. I went back into the dashboard for the old platform and grabbed some data about all those posts and thought it would be interesting to look at the top 10 posts ever. So here it goes.
The Top 10
- NetApp Useable Capacity - Going, going, gone (November 2008): Jim Haberkorn wrote this after returning from a customer visit. My - who would ever have thunk that visiting a customer would result in the #1 post of all time. There are comments as recent as a few months ago on it.
- HP's new solid state storage web page (October 2008): This one kind of surprises me. Nothing controversial - just a short post pointing to a page we had done about solid state storage. There was a lot of chatter at the time that SSD's would overtake Fibre Channel disk drives - HP's view hasn't changed - SSDs have their place but the over-hyping it got from one company has proven to be just that, hype.
- Do SMB's really need tape? Good question! (July 2008): Is there really a need for the DAT/DDS tape format - why not just use an older generation (meaning cheaper) version of LTO? This article answered that question.
- What constitutes brave new thinking? (March 2009): Everyone seems to enjoy the new "stack wars" - this was an article written by our marketing director Lee Johns addressing the announcement of Cisco's UCS. A year later, HP has increased market share in the blades market and Converged Infrastructure is gaining a lot of traction, but battle lines have been drawn and it should be interesting to watch.
- Understanding FAS ESRP results (September 2009): I found this to be the most interesting article and ensuing comments EVER. It's always controversial to take on a competitor but when it's done with testing and facts, I think these kinds of articles have a lot of value. Karl Dohm, an R&D engineer in HP StorageWorks, had been looking at performance of the NetApp FAS. He had done a lot of testing and was seeing a repeatable pattern - new, pristine FAS systems scream but under load, performance degrades over time. He re-ran an ESRP test that NetApp had run and his results were.... well, you'll just have to read this one for yourself to understand. To this day, I've never had anyone at NetApp explain this phenomenon. I even found an VMware paper that shows the exact same thing Karl found (see Figures 3 and 4 that show performance slowing down significantly under load) but still have never heard a reason why the performance degrades.
- HP LeftHand capacity (June 2009): Over the last two years, HP has gained a lot of traction in the market with our P4000 (formerly HP LeftHand). When you're a competitor and you see that happening - what do you do? Well, when you're NetApp - you resort to FUD. This article was responding to the FUD that NetApp was communicating (and still do today).
- Box score on NetApp capacity calculator (July 2009): There had been so much back and forth on the FUD NetApp was trying to create that I wrote a post summarizing the conversation, hoping to resolve things. Well, I've since learned that nothing is ever resolved when it comes to NetApp. The post just stimulated more back and forth comments - Alex likes to dog-pile.
- My thoughts on Dave Donatelli coming to HP (March 2009): I learned about Dave coming to HP about an hour before it was announced publicly (from someone leaking it on Twitter). This was a raw, tell it like it is article I wrote after learning about it. Given Dave has been here now for a bit over a year and is now very engaged in HP Storage, I'm thinking a follow-up to this would be good some time soon.
- NetApp's "shining" moment - it's capacity guarantee program (December 2008): NetApp had (maybe still do, I don't know) a capacity guarantee program. My good friend Jim Haberkorn took it on and stimulated a lot of discussion (wow, big surprise there). I sure hope Alex doesn't pop a gasket by seeing all this stuff again!
- Making sense of WAFL part 4 (December 2008): This article was a predecessor to the work Karl Dohm did in our #5 top post on the list. Initially, Karl used a third party paper that had details of performance testing - Karl was trying to make sense of that and replicate the results he was seeing with the FAS system he was testing. The challenge here (and I get it) is that most people will dismiss what Karl found because he's an HP employee. I know Karl, I know his integrity, and I know the integrity that HP demands from its employees - there's no spinning of data here and I'd bet a months salary on that fact.
So that's my tour of the top 10 posts (based on page views) over the last two and a half years. This was kind of fun for me to revisit some of these - I'm thinking I might do another one just looking at the most viewed articles over the last year or the most commented articles. If you have a "top 10" you want see, let me know.
As always, comments are welcome!
