David Pattersons seminal paper on RAID

• A Case for Redundent Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)

A Fast File System for UNIX

I am mentoring a new starter at NetApp and so I found a couple of papers which discuss at a high level some of the problems that WAFL and RAID set out to solve. Both papers are quite old, but are interesting in that they discuss the big picture of the original problem.

A Storage Networking Appliance
This is a great paper which discusses the principles of the “filer” concept.

• NetApp Internal (Updated 2006) :

File System Design for an NFS
File Server Appliance

• File System Design for an NFS
  File Server Appliance

• Usenix : Text file (1994 Version):
• ACM Digital Library PDF (1994 Version) :

Just recently an ex-colleague from Sun asked me to send him some background info on NetApp filer performance. Normally the filer can just be plugged in and it ought to be ready to go without much tweaking. The following documents give some background on how to setup a filer in various environments.

• A list of all technical reports
• Database Performance with NFS: Optimizing Oracle on NFS.
  A little dated, but still an interesting introduction to using NFS in an enterprise environment

• Best Practices for File System Alignment in Virtual Environments. Some specific tips for using a filer with hypervisors
• Evaluating the Performance of FCoE, iSCSI, and FC Using DSS Workloads with Microsoft SQL Server 2008
• If You’re Doing This, Then Your Storage Could Be Underutilized
• Introduction to Predictive Cache Statistics
  DataONTAP contains a facility which enables users to determine how much benefit they might get from installing a flash based accelerator card (FlashCache).

• Performance Study of IBM DB2 9 with NFS, iSCSI, and FCP
  The recommendations in this document are also generally applicable across NFS, iCSCI and FCP.

• NetApp and VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 Storage Best Practices

Page http://omniti.com/surge/2010/speakers/neil-gunther

Slides http://s.omniti.net/surge/i/content/slides/NeilGunther.pdf

Neil Gunther on Scalability at SurgeCon 2010

Terrible audio, but worth listening to.

Google performance testing

I found this repository of filesystem related documents and papers whilst looking for something behind Usenix paywall, which I don’t have access to.

http://www.fsl.cs.sunysb.edu/all-pubs.html

If titles like “Extending ACID Semantics to the File System” turn you on. This is the place for you!

On Janurary 5th 2010 I gave a short presentation on the FileBench workload modeling tool to the RTP OpenSolaris group. Click on the slide to advance. The “Slides” link will take you to an HTML version.

Slides

A set of recorded presentations from the Velocity 09 conference, many of which are related to performance. Particularly “Internet Scale” problems.

Here’s the link: Velocity 2009

A 2004 paper from Neil Gunther which essentially discusses the pitfalls of relying on observed date without applying the known performance laws (most notably little’s law) to the problem at hand.

PDF

The original link to arXiv.org (whatever that is)