IBM blade server abysmal disk write performances

[Dieter BSD]

Matthew writes:
> There is also no information in the original email as to which direction
> the I/O was being sent.

In one of the followups, Karim reported:
  # dd if=/dev/zero of=foo count=10 bs=1024000
  10+0 records in
  10+0 records out
  10240000 bytes transferred in 19.615134 secs (522046 bytes/sec)

522 KB/s is pathetic.