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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• We’re Never Content – Amazon announces a forthcoming CDN layered on top of S3 with “edge locations on three continents” – presumably North America, Europe and Asia – “in order to deliver your content from the most appropriate location.” Presumably Amazon is planning to use this in-house for their digital media sales, or possibly for static content on their website.
• Tape, Roman Chariots and Data Management – “But here’s where it gets insidious, we know look at the mess that tape has created, and instead of asking the question: ‘Is a data protection infrastructure predicated on creating whole copies on a regular basis flawed?’ We ask the question: ‘How can I make creating and storing full copies more efficient?’” An interesting read – nothing new – but somehow I don’t think that the solution the author would propose involves tape in an HSM scenario. Which is too bad, because an HSM environment using tape really can address the problems mentioned in the article, as well as other issues such as capacity and power.

There’s nothing like a long summer weekend followed by an on-site consultant to keep you from updating your blog. But on the bright side, I didn’t have to link to the notebook SSDs are dead – no they’re not kerfluffle.

• NetApp finds NAS could mean ‘never accessed storage’ – “According to a USENIX presentation, 90% of data on NetApp’s networked storage systems was untouched over a 3-month period, raising the issue of whether it would be better placed on cheaper storage.” I would find some irony in that cheaper storage being tape.
• zfs un-benchmarking – “Our rationale for testing was to finally get some numbers that we can provide to users/customers about real zfs performance. There is a huge amount of (largely uncontested) information (emanating mainly from Sun and its agents) that zfs is a very fast file system. We want to test this, on real, live hardware, and report. Well, we can’t do the latter due to Sun’s licensing, but we did do the former. Paraphrasing Mark Twain: ‘Rumors of zfs’s performance have been greatly exaggerated.’” When Joe Landman blogs about performance, I take what he has to say seriously, but given the stability problems he notes, I wonder if – as he suggests – that driver issues are a factor here, and we’re not seeing a generic ZFS issue. (Seen at InsideHPC.)
• Self-protecting archive for SharePoint – “A new archiving product from BridgeHead Software automatically moves older, infrequently-accessed SharePoint items to cheaper archive media and cuts down the SharePoint backup burden.” HSM for SharePoint, apparently? Sounds interesting.
• Since NFSv4 is Stateful It Must Be Less Robust, Right? – “The short answer is no.” Interesting summary of how locking works under NFSv4; although I haven’t used NFSv4, this sounds like a massive improvement over previous versions – can I get the time that I spent debugging locking problems on Linux NFS servers back now?
• Storage Opens Up – Sun releases new JBODs and upgrades Thumper’s hardware. Given that I heard rumors of the Thumper expansion shelves (J4500) maybe a year ago, I’m surprised it took them so long to come out. And is it just me, or do the J4200 and J4400 look a little like someone else’s boxes rebranded?