Amazon Elastic Block Store is out!

Andy August 21st, 2008

Amazon’s much-awaited Elastic Block Store for EC2 is out this morning; I’m excited to give this a try. A couple downers from the announcement: The pricing is somewhat high - $0.10 per allocated GB per month plus $0.10 per 1 million I/O requests - and the reliability isn’t where I’d like it to be. Specifically, Amazon notes:

Volumes that operate with 20 GB or less of modified data since their most recent Amazon EBS snapshot can expect an annual failure rate (AFR) of between 0.1% - 0.5%, where failure refers to a complete loss of the volume. This compares with commodity hard disks that will typically fail with an AFR of around 4%, making EBS volumes 10 times more reliable than typical commodity disk drives.

Because Amazon EBS servers are replicated within a single Availability Zone, mirroring data across multiple Amazon EBS volumes in the same Availability Zone will not significantly improve volume durability.

That last sentence makes it sound like there is a 0.1% - 0.5% chance of catastrophic data loss of many distinct EBS volumes in an availability zone. If that’s the case, that’s scary - off the top of my head, I’d say your run-of-the mill “Enterprise” SAN doesn’t have a one-in-two hundred risk of catastrophic failure per year.

More links, not all of which I’ve had a chance to fully digest yet:

OpenSolaris 2008.05 on EC2 - Why 32-bit only?

Andy August 18th, 2008

Since Sun and Amazon removed the limit on the number of OpenSolaris 2008.05 instances able to run on EC2, I’ve been curious - and a little bothered - by the fact that the 2008.05 AMI is 32-bit only. Curious because OpenSolaris shouldn’t have any issues running on a 64-bit EC2 instance (there are other 64-bit OpenSolaris AMIs available on EC2, after all), and a little bothered because there have been long-standing reports of trouble running Solaris on 32-bit architectures, which makes me hesitant to invest much effort in a 32-bit OpenSolaris EC2 environment.

Well, perhaps a 64-bit AMI is forthcoming - I think this is still a beta program - and perhaps Sun’s just trying to save us a buck or two, since the cheapest 64-bit EC2 instance is four times as expensive per hour as the cheapest 32-bit instance.

Links 8/18/2008: CacheFS

Andy August 18th, 2008

  • Less known Solaris Features: CacheFS - Joerg Moellenkamp at c0t0d0s0.org offers another installment of his excellent Less known Solaris Features series. Of note: “In the recent days there was some discussion about the declaration of the End-of-Feature status for CacheFS which will lead to the announcement of the removal of CacheFS. After a few days of discussion the ARC decided in favour of the removal.” While I’ve never personally used CacheFS - and see no use case for it on the horizon - I’m not thrilled to see it slated for removal as it does sound like it serves an important role. Perhaps ADM or SAM-QFS will become more general to support this style of HSM as well in the future.

Afternoon 8/14/2008 Link Dump: Eisler on NFSv4

Andy August 14th, 2008

  • Part III: Since NFSv4 is Stateful It Must Be Less Robust, Right? - “This should conclude my series on this topic, but obviously it’s my blog and like any content provider with no self-respect, I am free to make as many sequels as I want in order to milk the topic for all it is worth. I am going to compare the impact on applications when the NFS client it is using recovers from an NFSv3 and NFSv4 server restart.” Good stuff.

8/14/2008 Link Dump

Andy August 14th, 2008

Capacity Limit for OpenSolaris on EC2 no more

Andy August 14th, 2008

According to a blog post on blogs.sun.com, the capacity limit for OpenSolaris 2008.05 on EC2 has been removed.

The blog entry makes it sound like you no longer need to register with Sun to use OpenSolaris on EC2, but that doesn’t appear to be the case - I only see the AMI in my private instances, and the details on the image seem to confirm this.
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The Best Links that were later deleted, 8/11/2008

Andy August 11th, 2008

So I returned from a little five-day weekend to sunny Lake Chelan and the Columbia River to an RSS reader bursting at the seams with new posts. By far the best post was one later deleted:

  • Amazon Elastic Block Store goes live! (Yeah, that link’s dead - like I said, it was later deleted.) The RightScale folks appear to have inadvertently published a draft (on 8/8, the day after I left town) of their blog post designed to coincide with the release of Amazon’s Elastic Block Store for EC2. They later deleted it, but Google Reader kindly cached the post for me. I won’t repeat anything in the post, nor would I bank on anything written there - would you gamble anything important on a retracted post about a not-yet-released product? I will add one comment: Will EBS attract attention of the lawsuit kind from NetApp? (I mean that comment only partially in jest - and you’d probably have to have seen the original post to know what I’m talking about.)

Links, 8/6/2008

Andy August 6th, 2008

It’s summer, apparently everyone is on vacation, but, quietly:

NetApp FAS 2020 Sizing

Andy August 4th, 2008

It’s been a while since I posted about my unhappiness with NetApp’s FAS2020. And while we’ve replaced our 2020 with a 2050, I still get a lot of traffic to those pages, and a few emailed questions from prospective or new 2020 owners asking about the so-called 8TB limit. Here’s a summary of what I know:
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Quick and Dirty VMware ESX Patching

Andy July 31st, 2008

On the ESX console, do the following:

  • Read the documentation for each patch.
  • Group patches that can be installed together into a directory, possibly an NFS mount available on all your ESX hosts.
  • Cd into the patch directory and untar the patches:

    for i in `ls *.tgz`; do
    tar -xvzf $i
    done

  • Install the patches:

    for i in `ls`; do
    if [ -d $i ]; then
    cd $i
    esxupdate --noreboot update
    cd ..
    fi
    done

  • Reboot.

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