I can’t speak to Harold’s comments, as we don’t have anyone on our staff named Harold. But I can understand the pseudo-anonymous poster’s enthusiasm. Ruptured Monkey is a very good blog, as I communicated to you via e-mail a few weeks ago. It’s always good to learn about what users are seeing and caring about in the world of storage.

To answer the specific questions that have risen in response to his thinly-veiled advertisement, BlueArc introduced a global namespace in February when we debuted the Titan 2000 series. In our tests at customer sites, our internal lab efforts, and on SPECsfs, we see no performance impact with multiple nodes, unlike other competitors.

I am also familiar with customers who have extremely challenging environments with millions of files per directory and billions of files total. This has been seen in the Internet services market and others. BlueArc’s hardware platform enables massive parallelization, and separation of function, without centralized bottlenecks.

I’ve been at the company going on six years now, work closely with our customers and would be happy to answer questions via e-mail or phone off-line, rather than distract this good thread about MySpace. Keep up the good work and we’ll keep reading.

Do you guys have global namespace available? How would the performance of many arrays be balanced across all of them as the data grows to billions of files?

Do you have much experience with them Harold?

I posted a similar question on Google's shop size a while back, on the RM forum. In the time passed since then, I read an article on the Google File System, which I currently am unable to find.
The Wikipedia reference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_File_System gives a good impression on the magnitude of Google's shop. Check bullit 4. in the reference section.

Having their own optimized filesystem (not publicly available) must mean you have extreme requirements and needs. In our shop the performance requirements are nowhere near the requirements of the online service providers. Nevertheless we want good performance for our customers.

As I've said in various previous posts and comments, we are in the middle of acquiring new disk storage systems. 4 big iron storage vendors are participating in the tender. We asked for nothing but 146GB/15Krpm spindles. Some seem pretty stubborn and keep insisting on offering 300GB/10Krpm spindles, because, according to them, these are capable of satisfying our requirements. Yeah right. That's either because their hardware doesn't hold enough drive slots to store the required amount of spindles to satisfy our storage needs, of they are really trying to give us the best price in order to win the deal.
We've used a modeling tool to check the systems maximum IO's/second and throughput, and doing anything less then 15Krpm brings the system to it's knees. Those stubborn vendors are likely to not to make it to the next round.

This said, I am really curious on how these big iron vendors go about their offerings when a MySpace kind of shop goes for a renewal They could never even dare to offer anything less then the absolute best performing setup. Being stubborn could really get you banned from the computer floor.