Stop fiddling with your VMAX knobs or I'll chop your fingers off

Storagebod An EMC systems engineer has written a blog post about the VMAX FAST VP array. While it's full of good advice, he unintentionally sums up everything that's wrong with VMAX today: the knobs.

The blog in question, written by Sean Cummins, is well written and goes into plenty of detail about getting the best out of VMAX FAST VP.

Unfortunately, VMAX simply has too many nerd-knobs, meaning people think they should fiddle with it and try and out-do the machine.

And hence they'll probably make a right old mess with FAST VP ending up not working as well as it should. In turn this will make people fiddle even more and the next thing you know, you are trying to manage your VMAX in the way you would have managed an old-school Symm.

I think it is time that EMC and their users seriously consider breaking away from the past; the old-school nerd-knob fettling needs to stop. I know that is why storage admins get paid the big bucks but I do wonder if we might be better paying them to stop.

I long for the day when we see VMAX managed without worrying about what the internal engines are doing, when we set various performance parameters and just let the array sort it out. The day when we pay for performance and capacity without worrying how the system gets to it will be a happy one indeed.

There is at least one amusing part of advice in the article, though, and although it is well-argued and there appears to be good reason to do so, you should still keep the FC-tier on RAID-1 mirrored disks. Nothing really changes in the world of Symm! ®