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.
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• Elektronkind: OpenSolaris 2008.11 – A Preview For The Storage Admin – A look at upcoming storage technologies in OpenSolaris 2008.11, including ZFS, iSCSI, NDMP, COMSTAR, AVS and SAM-QFS. These products really set OpenSolaris apart from Linux distributions, although I wonder how official this list is, and have some doubts about the status of some of the projects. For example, there doesn’t appear to be much activity on the SAM-QFS OpenSolaris project, although maybe I’m just looking in the wrong place. (Seen at c0t0d0s0.org.)
• Ruling: SCO owes Novell $2.54 million from SCO-Sun SVRX deal – Interesting excerpt: “Judge Kimball also reviewed SCO’s agreement with Sun and found that some of the terms exceeded SCO’s licensing authority. Through the agreement, SCO lifted the confidentiality provisions of Sun’s 1994 SVRX deal with Novell even though SCO was not permitted to do so without Novell’s explicit consent. The judge concluded that lifting of the SVRX confidentiality provisions was not incidental to a UnixWare license and was consequently not permissible. This raises some intriguing legal questions about OpenSolaris, which includes SVRX code that we now know SCO clearly had no right to let Sun open.” I wonder if we’ll be hearing more about this in the coming months.
• Interview: IT consumerization and the future of higher ed – Another interesting piece on Ars Technica from today, an interview with Oren Sreebny of the University of Washington, whose best bits obliquely refer to the challenges of miasma computing and information security. Quotes: “Lately we’ve been looking at Google and Microsoft offerings for commodity stuff, and one of the things we deal with in some of our research [departments] is government regulations about ‘exporting munitions.’ So one of the manifestations of those government regulations is that you cannot store your data outside the US if you’re working on some types of government-funded projects. Google has said, ‘We can’t guarantee that anybody’s stuff in particular won’t be in a datacenter that’s located outside the US, so don’t bring that stuff to us,’ which is exactly what I’d be saying if I was them. So we have to figure out, as we start to move in those directions, what we do about that.” Also: “[Separate identity principals for people who are working on sensitive data] is an interesting conversation because, in many ways we’ve spent the last decade trying to integrate people’s identity, and do single-sign-on, and not make them have lots of separate accounts in separate places. And in many ways it really goes against the grain to step back from that, but maybe it’s time to do that.”

poptart> version
NetApp Release 7.2.4L1: Wed Nov 21 00:49:33 PST 2007
poptart> aggr add aggr0 11
Aggregate size 8.48 TB exceeds limit 7.00 TB
aggr add: Can not add specified disks to the aggregate because the aggregate size limit for this system type would be exceeded.
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