SUN Open­Stor­age presentation

At work (client site) SUN made a pre­sen­ta­tion about their Open­Stor­age prod­ucts (Sun Stor­age 7000 Uni­fied Stor­age Sys­tems) today.

From a tech­nol­o­gy point of view, the soft­ware side is noth­ing new to me. Using SSDs for zfs as a read-/write-cache is some­thing we can do (part­ly) already since at least Solaris 10u6 (that is the low­est Solaris 10 ver­sion we have installed here, so I can not check quick­ly if the ZIL can be on a sep­a­rate disk in pre­vi­ous ver­sions of Solaris, but I think we have to wait until we updat­ed to Solaris 10u8 until we can have the L2ARC on a sep­a­rate disk) or in FreeB­SD. All oth­er nice ZFS fea­tures avail­able in the Open­Stor­age web inter­face are also not surprising.

But the demon­stra­tion with the Stor­age Sim­u­la­tor impressed me. The inter­ac­tion with Win­dows via CIFS makes the old­er ver­sion of files in snap­shots avail­able in Win­dows (I assume this is the Vol­ume Shad­ow Copy fea­ture of Win­dows), and the sta­tis­tics avail­able via DTrace in the web inter­face are also impres­sive. All this tech­nol­o­gy seems to be well inte­grat­ed into an easy to use pack­age for het­ero­ge­neous envi­ron­ments. If you would like to set­up some­thing like this by hand, you would need to have a lot of knowl­edge about a lot of stuff (and in the FreeB­SD case, you would prob­a­bly need to aug­ment the ker­nel with addi­tion­al DTrace probes to be able to get a sim­i­lar gran­u­lar­i­ty of the sta­tis­tics), noth­ing a small com­pa­ny is will­ing to pay.

I know that I can get a lot of infor­ma­tion with DTrace (from time to time I have some free cycles to extend the FreeB­SD DTrace imple­men­ta­tion with addi­tion­al DTrace probes for the lin­ux­u­la­tor), but what they did with DTrace in the Open­Stor­age soft­ware is great. If you try to do this at home your­self, you need some time to imple­ment some­thing like this (I do not think you can take the DTrace scripts and run them on FreeB­SD, this will prob­a­bly take some weeks until it works).

It is also the first time I see this new CIFS imple­men­ta­tion from SUN in ZFS life in action. It looks well done. Inte­gra­tion with AD looks more easy than doing it by hand in Sam­ba (at least from look­ing at the Open­Stor­age web inter­face). If we could get this in FreeB­SD… it would rock!

The entire Open­Stor­age web inter­face looks usable. I think SUN has a prod­uct there which allows them to enter new mar­kets. A prod­uct which they can sell to com­pa­nies which did not buy some­thing from SUN before (even Windows-only com­pa­nies). I think even those Win­dows admins which nev­er touch a com­mand line inter­face (read: the low-level ones; not com­pa­ra­ble at all with the real­ly high-profile Win­dows admins of our client) could be able to get this up and running.

As it seems at the moment, our client will get a Sun Stor­age F5100 Flash Array for tech­nol­o­gy eval­u­a­tion in the begin­ning of next year. Unfor­tu­nate­ly the tech­nol­o­gy looks to easy to han­dle, so I assume I have to take care about more com­plex things when this machine arrives… 🙁

Read­ers who viewed this page, also viewed:

Share/Save

6 thoughts on “SUN Open­Stor­age presentation”

    1. Did you fol­low the instruc­tions in the Wiki (http://wiki.freebsd.org/DTrace)? Pay spe­cial­ly atten­tion to the part which tells that WITH_CTF does not work in src.conf. My cur­rent ker­nel is not com­piled with WITH_CTF, so this ker­nel is not able to use dtrace.

  2. Thanks
    All earned for­got kld­load dtraceall at this time:)
    Strange but ear­li­er for some rea­son did not work
    # dtrace ‑n “*” | head
    dtrace: descrip­tion ”*” matched 33839 probes
    CPU ID FUNCTION:NAME
    0 1 :BEGIN
    0 27987 critical_enter:entry
    0 27988 critical_enter:return
    0 25753 smp_rendezvous_cpus:entry
    0 16025 _mtx_lock_spin_flags:entry
    0 24949 witness_checkorder:entry
    0 24950 witness_checkorder:return
    0 20987 spinlock_enter:entry
    0 27987 critical_enter:entry
    desk# uname ‑rm
    9.0‑CURRENT amd64

  3. Great post. Do you think it is pos­si­ble to hook Win­dows “Ver­sions” up to a FreeB­SD box that has ZFS snap­shots? These instruc­tions look like they should work with FreeBSD:

    http://blogs.sun.com/amw/entry/using_the_previous_versions_tab

    I agree that Sun”s “in ker­nel” imple­men­ta­tion of CIFS is quite nice esp. with AD inte­gra­tion. It would not be as “easy” (heheh) to port as ZFS though. While I real­ly like FreeBSD”s new NFS4 imple­men­ta­tion (thanks rickm!) CIFS is start­ing to dis­place NFS (even NFS4) even in Unix shops 🙁

    It is strange when open source ver­sions of unix do not lever­age Ker­beros and LDAP as much as Microsoft. Sun/Oracle are chang­ing that a bit.

    1. Yes, in FreeB­SD zfs-snapshots work (it is more easy to tell what does not work: iSC­SI and CIFS exports). So if we could get a CIFS imple­men­ta­tion which sup­ports this (does not mat­ter if this is via Sam­ba or some­thing else), it should work.

  4. Pingback: Tarsnap usage statistics « The Daily BSD

Comments are closed.