c0t0d0s0.org

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 !

How can you use this feature? Some use cases are really obvious. It´s a natural match for disaster recovery. The Sun Cluster Geographic Edition even supports this kind of remote mirror out of the box to do cluster failover with wider distances than just a campus. But it´s usable for other jobs as well, for example for migrations to a new datacenter, when you have to transport a large amount data over long distances without a time window for a longer service interruption.

Andrew S. Tannenbaum said "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of tapes hurling down the highway". This sounds counterintuitive at the first moment, but when you start to think about it, it´s really obvious.

A new scenario: Okay, the filesystem gets replicated now. Let´s assume that we use /dev/rdsk/c1d0s1 for a database. The filesystem and the database partition are used from the same application and it´s important, that the metadata in the database an the binary objects are in sync even when you switched over to the remote site, albeit it´s acceptable to lose the last few transactions, as both sites are 1000km away from each other and synchronous replication is not an option.

One of the most essential tasks when configuring disaster recovery mechanism is training the procedure. Thus let´s test the switch into our remote datacenter. We will simulate a failure now. This will show that the data really get´s replicated to a different system

After this short introduction in the theory of AVS Remote mirror, we will set up such an replication between two hosts.

Some words about Sun StorageTek Availability Suite at first: We´ve opensourced the product quite a while ago. While it´s a commercial product for Solaris, we´ve integrated it into Solaris Express Community Edition and Developer Edition.

Solaris was designed with commercial customers in mind. Thus this operating environment has some capabilities that are somewhat useless for the soho user, but absolutly essential for enterprise users. One of this capabilities is remote replication of disk volumes. Imagine the following situation. You have a database and a filesystem for a central application of your company. The filesystem stores binary objects (for example images or something like that). The application is so important for your company, that you plan to build a replicated site. And now your problems start.

Pheewww ... i´ve finalized my SamFS tutorial, a long text. SamFS is the hierarchical Storage Management Filesystem from sun. Several new concepts, so you have to explain some theory before getting to the shell:

• Part 1: Introduction.html
• Part 2: The theory of Hierarchical Storage Management
• Part 3: The Jargon of SamFS
• Part 4: Installation of the packages
• Part 5: Configuring a SamFS filesystem
• Part 6: Configuring disk archiving
• Part 7: Working with SamFS
• Part 8: Usecases and future directions
• Part 9: Conclusion

As usual: Have fun!

Okay, this was a rather long tutorial and i didn´t even talked about the configuration of tape devices. As i told you before: Only the toes in the atlantic ocean. But i hope, i gave you some insight into a somewhat unconventional topic and a capability of an optional part the Solaris Operating Environment. I assume, with the opensourcing of SamFS we will see a much more widespread use of it.

Okay, after all this configuration. How can you use it? Well, the most obivous usage of SamFS is Archiving. And many customers use it for exactly this task: Archiving audio, archiving video, archving eMails, documents, xrays, satellite images, simulation data, data of large experimental system. Everything that´s worth to be stored for a long long time. That´s the job, it was designed for.