thinking sysadmin

With surprisingly little buzz (outside of sun.com) – must be that darned economy – Sun launched its new Fishworks product line yesterday: Three hardware products, several of them with flash drives, and an impressive looking user interface, which appears at first glace to surpass anything NetApp offers. Here’s a quick rundown of features from Mike Shapiro on blogs.sun.com:

• NFS v3 and v4
• CIFS
• iSCSI
• HTTP
• WebDAV
• FTP
• RAID-Z (RAID-5 and RAID-6), Mirrored, and Striped disk configurations
• Unlimited Read-only and Read-write Snapshots, with Snapshot Schedules
• Built-in Data Compression
• Remote Replication of data for Disaster Recovery
• Active-Active Clustering (in the Sun Storage 7410) for High Availability
• Thin Provisioning of iSCSI LUNs
• Virus Scanning and Quarantine
• NDMP Backup and Restore

A few comments: Looks like all of the usual ZFS features are there, with a few additions – in particular, I wasn’t aware that the virus scanning project existed, and I didn’t know that NDMP was far enough along to be included in a production release. Additionally, from looking at various Sun blogs, I believe that the remote replication feature is zfs send/recv, not AVS. Finally, from the nomenclature (“2008.11″), I’d guess that the software is based on the forthcoming release of OpenSolaris, not the recently released update to Solaris 10.

What’s missing? Off the top of my head:

• Fibre Channel – COMSTAR is coming, presumably.
• HSM – ADM is also presumably on its way in a future release.
• HCL entries for various products like VMware, but again, I have to believe that Sun is working hard on this as well.

My first impression from the launch materials: Neat, but the price seems high. Looking at list prices for the models, and doing some quick calculations for RAID-Z2 configurations with at least one hot spare, the price per usable TB ranges from $3999 and $3933 for a 7210 with 250GB and 1TB drives, respectively, to $11,209 for a single head 7410. Compare this to the hardware that the 7210/250GB is based on, the X4540, where you pay $2513.71 per usable TB. Now, as far as I know, Sun isn’t offering flash drives with their non-Fishworks hardware, so it makes direct comparisons of the price of the Fishworks Special Sauce impossible for most of the rest of the line, but that may change later this fall.

Other thoughts: Why not use the UltraSPARC T2 instead of Opterons? I’d expect better performance from the UltraSPARCs, especially when using 10GbE. Is it a cost issue?

One final note: Sun is making their simulator (a VMware image) available for download – nice touch.