Two aspects of the recent release of the J4410 expansion module for the Sun Storage 7000 Modular System got blogger Ryan Matthews excited. These were the switch from SATA to SAS drives and the improved granularity with which storage pools can now be configured.

"Fat SAS" (1 or 2TB disks capable of spinning at 7200 RPM and with a SAS interface; and the ability to provision storage at the granularity of a single disk instead of a 12-disk diskset. These changes and the 2010.Q1 enhancements that enable multiple pools per controller gave Matthews the impetus to attempt to rework the 7000 Size Calculator, he writes. As part of his approach to the sizing issue, Matthews writes that he felt a need for revised input language, one that would handle only the new hardware generation.

Matthews notes that it is possible to order J4410-based configurations: "full" and "with room for log devices," the latter of which has four open slots in the top row that can be used with Log devices. Furthermore, Matthews continues, within each module, one can choose to allocate some of the disks to one or more pools. He provides a code sample of the new input language.

The author shows how he specified a single expansion module configured with three pools, with 8 disks allocated to each pool. Wishing to specify two expansion modules, he added another layout statement, for which he also provides code.

He shows how it is possible to allocate a total of 20 drives to pool 1, 10 to pool 2, and 18 to pool three with disks spread across both modules. Matthews adds that another new feature is strict mode, which ensures that the number of disks specified for a given expansion module adds to either 20 (for the 'with room' configuration) or 24. Strict mode is enabled simply with the '-s' argument, for which he provides the code and includes an illustration of this configuration using the capability to show which disks are in which pool using the newly included ASCII art to draw this. Matthews also provides an illustration of a configuration that includes a 'with room' module.

In the case of the latter illustration, one can see the Log slots and notice as well that the default disk size is 2TB, though he writes that one may still model 1TB configurations using the "size" keyword from earlier releases. The "add" command also comes into play, and Matthews illustrates a configuration that uses both.

In the closing lines of the blog, Matthews includes a link to a download of the Sun Storage 7000 size calculator.

Also, in a footnote, Matthews credits the observations of a reader who caught an error that, uncorrected, would have caused the calculator to crash.

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