c0t0d0s0.org

Ben Rockwood gave a really interesting keynote at the first Open Storage Summit about "Storage in the Cloud". When you are interested in storage with Opensolaris it´s definitly worth a look.

I´m not entirely sure if it´s a good idea to talk about the winds of change amidst the hurricane season, but Jonathan wrote a good article about the changing perspectives in our storage business - Fanning the Winds of Change in Storage:

But back to the equity analyst - he patiently asked, "Great theory, but when will you see revenue results?"

"Last year," I responded. "You're seeing it accelerate."

Ashlee Vance blogs at his new employer about our FISHworks concept. I really think, there is a common misunderstanding about FISHworks. Most people still doesn´t get the idea behind FISHworks. Ashlee writes, that we are too secret about the stuff and that we didn´t show off something.

At first - Fishwork isn´t a filer. Period. It´s an important part of the filer project. Fishwork is more like a way to build appliances, it´s a way to make appliances out of Solaris.

Apropos storage, Computerworld did a nice piece about upcoming Opensolaris based storage appliances.

The Register reports about the actual IDC number in the storage market:

But while the market grew 18.8 per cent compared to Q2 cy'07 only Sun (34.7 per cent) and NetApp (22.9 per cent) outgrew the market and gained share. The other six vendors all gave up share growing as follows

And we didn´t even announced the OpenStorage based products ... as far as i see it from my perspective and the internally available informations, they will give us a huge opportunity to grow. Interesting times adhead of us.

Elektronkind wrote a nice summary about all the features interesting for a storage admin in OpenSolaris 2008.11 - A Preview For The Storage Admin. He highlights the most important features of the Solaris Operating Environment in regard of storage.

Today we have announced the 1 TB tape drive: Sun Microsystems Announces World's First One Terabyte Tape Storage Drive. The the T10000B delivers 120 MB/sec throughput with 1 TB native. The next competitor (LTO4) has 800 GB native.The only disadvantage: This tape drives are enterprise hardware and build to last ... so the pricetag is $37.000. So don´t wait for it as you backup solution at home.

Sun announced some new storage components today: At first we announced the J4200 and J4400 disk arrays. They are JBOD´s, just bunches of disks. The J4200 has up to 12 SAS or SATA disks in a 2 RU enclosure.

The new J4400 is a 4 RU enclosure with 24 SAS or SATA disks. It´s a doubled up version of the J4200:

Well ... and then there is the J4500. As the name suggests, it´s a JBOD that looks really similar to the X4500 - the Thumper - and it has similar characteristics: 48 harddisks on 4 rack units.

When you look at the rear side of the J4500 you will not see the Opteron based System controller. Instead of this you see an interface board with four SAS-connectors. Two of them are host connect ports. The other two are used to stack J4500 enclosures together.

And last but not least there is the X4540. It´s our new storage server. It looks almost as the old one. The changes are internal ones. The system now uses quad-core chips instead of dual-cores, the system gives you 3 PCI Express slots instead of the PCI-X slots of the old system. The new X4540 has a slot for a compact-flash card to boot the operating system. Or to say it more shortly: We integrated the stuff our customers wanted to see in the next-gen thumper.

Robin from storagemojo wrote an interesting comment about the The Hitz report (Dave Hitz´s declaration in the Sun/NetApp lawsuit):

The NetApp/Sun patent battle continues. I don’t see how NetApp can win this, given the Supreme Court’s Teleflex decision, which makes prior art a question that can be appealed all the way to the Supreme Court.
But the company is doggedly pursuing the battle, and Dave Hitz’s recent declaration - which he hoped would remain private - has been unsealed.

I´ve thought a little bit about the upcoming flash drives in our systems yesterday evening while summarizing a meeting with a customer regarding our Open Storage initiative. I really think that these system will change the business in storage.

The new Common SCSI Target Framework made it into build 90 of Opensolaris. In this first integration, the target mode driver for qlogic cards ins included. It´s now really easy to create a FC storage array out of a X4500 and opensolaris. You will find further informations on the project page at opensolaris.org.

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.

OSNews published a good and positive article about the filesystem choices at Opensolaris - Solaris Filesystem Choices:

True, some of these features can be found in any enterprise-ready UNIX OS. But Solaris 10 integrates all of them into one well-tested package

(Thanks to Christopher for the link)

Otmar Meier of otmanix.de wrote a nice summary of all the features in Solaris making it a good choice for storage systems: Solaris als Storageserver. Sorry, it´s in german, but the links in the text are very useful even without the rest of the article.

As i told you before, Remote Mirror of the Availability Suite is a rather unusual feature. Nevertheless it´s a really useful feature. The possibilties of such tools are endless, but it isn´t heavy wizardry as you may have noticed already. So it´s definitly a feature you should try.

• Part 1: Introduction
• Part 2: The fundamentals of Remote mirroring
• Part 3: Setting up a synchronous mirror
• Part 4: Testing the replication
• Part 5: Replication Groups
• Part 6: Deactivating a replication
• Part 7: Truck based synchronisation
• Part 8: Conclusion

As usual: Have fun !