Motivations for this Blog

Before we begin to explore this topic in detail, I feel the need to be clear on my motivations for writing this blog.

Simply put, I have always had a fascination with coaxing as much performance out of a system as possible. It's always fun to see how fast you can push a system and also watch a variety of bugs surface during high bandwidth testing.

During my years in enterprise testing, I discovered that a certain dynamic of system performance was routinely overlooked. And this dynamic was simply the performance or bandwidth of embedded or slot based peripherals such as storage and networking adapters.

Many times, these performance anomalies can be traced back to poor design or motherboard layout, but they also can be signs of deeper systemic problems. A true pet peeve of mine is when a server only allows for a fraction of the advertised available bandwidth. Unfortunately, this is often the case.

On a more selfish note, my company created a bandwidth intensive product called Iris. Iris is software that can convert any x86-64 system into a high speed Fibre Channel storage device. Based on the testing of hundreds of systems, it's pretty clear that our solution's primary bottleneck is the poor PCI (both X and Express) bandwidth allowable by so many of today's shipping systems.

So, the real motivation of this blog is twofold. One--it would be nice to educate the public on this shortcoming of enterprise systems. Especially since our checkbooks are the only tangible means of voting that we have in technology. We can choose to only purchase systems that live up to their basic bullet items--performance being one of them.

And second, as is the case with Iris, having fast and reliable systems only allow for faster and more innovative products.

In the words of Ricky Bobby, "If you ain't first, you're last!" So let's go looking for the fastest server shipping today. And let's expose the pretenders to the throne along the way.