Virtualization
What Live Optics collects, and what it quietly does not
First in a short series on the tool everyone runs before a storage or platform proposal. Knowing the shape of the data is the difference between a sizing and a guess.
Farid’s Angle farids.dev · Algiers
Infrastructure, written down while it is still true.
I size data centre and AI platforms for a living, in Algiers. These are the notes I wish someone had handed me before the meeting: what the numbers really say, where the vendor tool is quietly helping itself, and what breaks in month four.
Recent
All 80 articlesTwenty-four hours of Live Optics is not a workload profile
Second in the series. The collection window is the single input that most often invalidates a sizing, and it is the one nobody negotiates.
Reading Live Optics storage numbers without being led
Third in the series. IOPS, block size, read/write mix and the compression estimate — what each one is actually measuring, and where the sizing goes wrong.
From collection to proposal: write the assumptions on the page
Last in the Live Optics series. The arithmetic between the data and the recommendation is where every argument happens, and it is almost always invisible.
The order I read a Broadcom renewal quote in
Most people open the VMware renewal at the total. That number is the last thing you should look at, and by then you have already lost the argument.
What a parallel file system actually is
It is not a faster NAS. The architectural difference is that clients talk to many storage servers at once, and almost every operational surprise follows from that.
Metadata is the bottleneck, not bandwidth
Every parallel file system is sold on GB/s. Almost every one that disappoints in production is disappointing because of operations per second on small files.
Stripe count, stripe size, and the defaults that cost you most of your bandwidth
Two numbers control whether your parallel file system behaves like dozens of servers or like one. Most sites never change them.
Lustre in the real world: what operators actually complain about
The performance is not the issue. The issues are upgrades, client evictions, one slow target poisoning everything, and the fact that it assumes you employ someone who knows it.
IBM Storage Scale: what it does well, and the licensing conversation
GPFS by its older name. Technically excellent, operationally more forgiving than Lustre, and sold in a way that requires you to read carefully.
What I write about
All topicsAI infrastructure
GPUs, fabrics, power, and the parts nobody sizes.
Applied AI
Things I actually built and what broke.
Virtualization
VMware, AHV, KubeVirt, and life after the renewal.
Storage
Arrays, protocols, latency, and honest numbers.
Cloud
Where it pays off and where it quietly does not.
Security
Recovery, immutability, identity, exposure.
Platform
Kubernetes, OpenShift, and the operating model.