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Homepage of Sun Germany

Pagerank 6

Homepage of Jörg Möllenkamp

Pagerank 6

A few months ago i´ve speculated about the death of high end storage. At the end, all storage boxes from NetApp, EMC, HDS, HP, Sun et. al.are just custom build-computers with a custom build operating system (and to a part not even that) with a bulkload of harddisks connected to it. There is not really a technological barrier, that keeps other companies out of the market.

The biggest problem to build commodity storage boxes out of comodity components was the problem of having an operating system for it. Stable and with all needed features (beginning with a good filesytem and ending with the target modes for various interconnect technologies). And more important: This software has to be non-proprietary. Albeit some vendors uses a Unix derivate under the hood, the storage part is mostly closed down.

Okay, yesterday Sun announced the Open Storage Platform. When you look at Opensolaris you already find several components of a storage os. So it´s quite logical to use Opensolaris as the basis for an open storage system. The basic idea of Open Storage is simple: OpenStorage = commodity industry standard hardware + OpenSolaris. When you can combine standard hardware with a standard operating system, you can build even high end storage system with standard components thus building them to a price point much lower than today. As i´ve speculated in my older article: The problems of technology commodization will hit the vendors of high storage soon. When it´s not Opensolaris, it will be one of the other operating systems. But it´s inevitable. Well, i strongly believe, that Sun has a headstart because of all components in Opensolaris like ZFS, COMSTAR, FMA and so on. Time will tell.

Today, i upgraded my workstations at home to Opensolaris 2008.05 as the primary operating system. Went smoothly. When you don´t have to keep the Nvidia drivers out of your code because of political reasons, even installing and configuring the graphic card is a no-brainer. You have to do nothing. Correct settings out of the box.

The problem with the X300 ... it runs this mediocre operation system from Redmond. Dear Levono ... you could make it smaller, you could make it faster, you could even make it silver and cool-looking ... your problem is the OS.

(via: fakesteve)

You need a manifest for Service Management Facility. It´s simple service, so no complex property configurations or multiple instances. Then easySMF may a helpful tool for you. EasySMF is a web based tool to create simple manifests for direct import to the repository or as a starting point.

(found via cuddletech)

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In "Democratizing Storage" Jason writes about his opintion of ZFS and the usage of ZFS at his employer digitar. It´s really positive. You can summarize the article at best with the following quote:

When it comes to storing data, you’ll pry OpenSolaris (and ZFS) out of our cold dead hands. We won’t deploy databases on anything else.

Okay, quite often the configuration of a feature or application mandates that the data on the disk doesn´t change while you activate it. Okay, an easy way would be simply unmounting the disk. Okay, that´s possible but then you can´t access the data on the disk at all. You can´t even read from the filesystem, albeit this doesn´t change anything on the disk (okay, as long you´ve mounted the disk with noatime).

Okay, the next installment of the "Less known Solaris Features" series is online. This time i will discuss the feature Point in time copies with AVS. As i have to go through some theory at first, it´s a quite long tutorial. It´s the longest so far. Point-in-time copies are a rather unusual feature for small installations, but they are absolutly essential for many enterprise customers. And when you really think about it, there are many usecases even for small installations.

• Part 1: Introduction
• Part 2: Basics
• Part 3: Independent copy
• Part 4: Dependent copy
• Part 5: Compact dependent copy
• Part 6: Preparation of the test environment
• Part 7: Starting a point-in-time copy
• Part 8: Working with point-in-time copies
• Part 9: Disaster Recovery
• Part 10: Administration
• Part 11: Conclusion

Have fun while trying out the feature!