In the eyes of InfoWorld\'s Paul Venezia, the Sun Storage 7210 Unified Storage System is a winner. The combination of 48 drives, SSD log storage, broad protocol support, ZFS, and amazing GUI make for one great filer, he writes, labeling the solution "a tank in every sense of the word,"... that carves out a niche for itself in a wide variety of infrastructures.

Venezia makes clear the reasons for his enthusiasm, beginning with the 7210's two quad-core Opteron CPUs and 64GB of RAM, which roughly double the processing power present in the original X4500. It helps that the 7210 is a genuine appliance, rather than a simple server, Venezia adds. While the 7210 does run OpenSolaris, all interactions with the server are via the FishWorks GUI, not the command line.

"The FishWorks GUI is not only entirely Web-based, but entirely AJAX. At first, I wondered how wise that might be, but after only a few minutes of use, I was smitten. It's very attractive and very accessible. In fact, it may be the most complete filer interface I've ever seen, blowing the doors off Network Appliance's Web-based manager," he claims, adding that, "The FishWorks GUI ran without issue in Firefox on Linux and Mac OS, as well as in Internet Explorer on Windows."

Also a hit with Venezia is the solid-state drive (SSD) ("Logzilla") present in the system, specifically designed for write operations and configured as the ZIL (ZFS Intent Logging) drive, using RAM as a read cache, which can provide faster access times for the file system, leaving the physical disks to handle the data storage tasks. Logzilla is an 18GB write-biased SSD in a 3.5-inch form factor that looks identical to the hard drives in the 47 other internal hot-swap slots.

Venezia also enumerates the software features of the 7210 that appeal to him and that include a wide range of file-serving protocols: NFSv3, NFSv4, CIFS, iSCSI, FTP, and HTTP. The 7210 supports onboard virus scanning; snapshots; cloning; compression; SNMPv3/v4; NDMP (Network Data Management Protocol) backups; and CLI scripting in Perl, Python, Java, and more, he writes, adding that there's even an SSL-based phone-home option that can automate support services.

It's no small matter to Venezia that administering the 7210 is relatively straightforward, using drag-and-drop concepts to build link aggregation configurations and the like, though it occasioned a love/hate relationship with this approach because it was not immediately obvious why a link is or is not available to be configured. The user has to drag a physical interface around to link it, he asserts. "When dealing with configurations that can result in the box being completely inaccessible if a mistake is made, I prefer to have a much clearer representation," Venezia avers.

But, he continues, since one doesn't normally configure the network interface very often, this becomes a mere quibble, and the configuration and management of the server are as easy as one could expect. "There's no need for any CLI involvement, and creating storage pools, shares, quotas, snapshots, and such is really quite simple," he observes.

When Venezia tested the storage pool (zpool) he had configured with an NFS share via the GUI with his Linux workstation using the single-gigabit NIC on that box, he was surprised (and pleased) to find when he used dd to create a 10GB file on the NFSv3 share that it ran at nearly wire-rate, achieving a 115MBps sequential write time. Next, he tested with NFSv4 and got the same results, and, using Iometer and a Windows Vista system, he found it possible to get about 90MBps sequential writes.

Venezia found it simple to configure iSCSI and also found it possible to achieve nearly wire-rate throughput with sequential reads and writes via iSCSI and a software initiator running on a CentOS 5.2 system.

Running both single- and multiprotocol tests produced nearly wire-rate speeds via NFSv3, NFSv4, iSCSI, and CIFS from four separate client systems to the 7210 with a 2GB aggregate link, Venezia reports, adding that "the FishWorks interface didn't falter, even when the system was running as hard as it could."

What does it all add up to? Venezia is unequivocal in his assessment:

"The Sun Storage 7210 Unified Storage System isn't cheap, but the cost is actually fairly low considering the capabilities. Make no mistake, none of this capability would be possible without ZFS; no other file system available today can make use of the resources present in the 7210 like ZFS, and the addition of the solid-state logging drive just increases the potency of this file system. ...in terms of bang for the buck, Sun's 7210 is in rare territory. Regardless of price, son of Thumper is a uniquely complete representation of what a filer should be."

He rates the Sun Storage 7210 Unified Storage System a 9.2.

More Information

Sun Storage 7210 Unified Storage System

OpenSolaris Community: ZFS [...read more...]

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