[Beowulf] posting bonnie++ stats from our cluster: any comments about my I/O performance stats?

[Jeff Layton]

OK, I've had enough of Rahul's posting to this list so I thought
I would publically respond to his comments since they directly
affect me, my integrity, and the company I work for during the
day.

>> Heh ... depends on the vendor.  We are pretty open and free with our numbers
>> (to our current/prospective customers), and our test cases.
>>     
>
> True. I shouldn't generalize. But most vendors still. I wish they'd
> scrap all their "whitepapers". Vendor whitepapers (to me) seem the
> kind of document that strives to attain the minimum information
> density. Probably a good reading for the clueless non-technical guys
> sitting in top-management. Give me quantitative benchmarks or spec
> sheets any day! (Ok, ok, I am probably venting here; but talking
> knowledgably with vendors has been hard!)
>   

I have sent Rahul several whitepapers about products that we are
proposing. They discuss several aspects of what you _could_ achieve
for various configurations. The problem is that we are proposing a
specific configuration and have given him estimates of the performance.
But without actually building it and testing it we don't know the exact
performance. However, this is the case for  any customer and any
configuration.

Plus Rahul keeps asking about what benchmarks to run on his current
cluster to tell us something about the proposed cluster. The problem is
that he doesn't want to run the benchmarks I have suggested.

Rahul has not been able to grasp that storage performance depends upon
a great number of things:

- The number and type of disks
- The RAID configuration
- How the drives are connected to the host node
- The exact benchmarks

I have tried to talk to him about what he should likely to see in 
performance
but he has not, to this point, been able to understand that it takes alot of
_details_ to specify exact performance.

I don't want to take a public list to pick a fight but I don't want Rahul to
bad mouth me, my reputation, and the company I work for without some
sort or rebuttal.

Jeff