System News for Sun Users

Nexenta Trashes Win8 Storage Spaces

2012-01-09T17:00:00+01:00

Microsoft's Storage Spaces may well be fine for storing family photos and other personal memorabilia but as an enterprise storage tool? Not so much, contends Nexenta CEO Evan Powell in The Register article by Chris Mellor, noting the absence of such features as double and triple parity RAID, the ability to snapshot and replicate data, and the cryptographic-strength 256 bit checksums of ZFS-based solutions found in NexentaStor, which provide end-to-end data integrity. In addition, Powell points out the 16 Terabyte (16 TB) limit in the capacity of Storage Spaces. "It just isn't enterprise class," Powell asserts.

Ten OpenStorage Predictions for 2012

2011-12-26T17:00:00+01:00

Nexenta's Evan Powell offers 10 open storage predictions for 2012 and, in a commendable mood of candor, grades himself on predictions for 2011. One A+ mark involves his prediction that growth and demand for storage capacity would be exponential. He sees the same for 2012. Powell offers his A+ view that hardware commoditization will play an ever bigger role and awards an A+ for the prediction that sales in the server channel will increase, as he expects them to do in 2012. One last A+, and that is for predicting that Nexenta is the fastest growing storage company ever.

OpenStorage Summit Evokes Interest in Alternatives to Conventional Storage Technologies

2011-12-26T17:00:00+01:00

Reporting from the recent OpenStorage Summit, 451 Group analyst Dave Simpson notes a healthy degree of interest in open source alternatives to traditional storage systems. The economies that open source storage technologies such as Nexenta offer have apparently proven sufficiently compelling that Korea Telecom, for example, Asia's largest public cloud provider, has implemented those technologies and offers its services to customers at considerably reduced rates. Simpson also mentions new products from both Nexenta and Symantec, which have attracted considerable interest in the industry. These include NexentaStor 3.1.2 and Symantec's OpenStorage APIs.

Three Important Enhancements to the 7000 ZFS Storage Appliance

2011-12-09T17:00:00+01:00

In his post to oracle.com on ZFSSA - Tips & Tricks with your Oracle 7000 ZFS Storage Appliance Steve Tunstall announces the release of three new options for Oracle's Sun ZFS Storage portfolio:

Write-flash-cache SSDs have gone from 18GB to 73GB each.
New long-range transceivers for the 10GigE cards
3TB drives for the 7120 model; The 3TB drives for the 7320 and 7420 are in the works.

Tunstall's post also includes this End-of-Life information for the 2TB drive-equipped base model of the 7120 and the 18GB Write Flash Cache.

Sun ZFS Storage Appliance Deduplication Design and Implementation Guidelines

2011-03-17T16:00:00+01:00

This paper by Jeff Wright describes the technical aspects of the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance deduplication feature and how to apply this feature to solve common IT storage challenges. Among the aspects of the subject that Wright considers are:

Improving Storage Efficiency with Compression and Deduplication
Data Deduplication in the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance
Application Guidelines for Deduplication
Performance Guidelines for Deduplication
Known Issues and Limitations

Storage system deduplication combined with data compression provides a compelling and effective solution for increasing efficiency.

The top 10 drivers of the storage industry in 2011: Part 1

2011-01-18T17:00:00+01:00

The face of storage is changing, and Nexenta's Evan Powell highlights the top 10 drivers of the storage industry in 2011: Part 1 in a recent blog. The first five are:

Capacity demands will continue their exponential rate of growth

IT vendors will appreciate more profit from storage than any other segment

Hardware commoditization (read Nexenta, Supermicro, other OpenStorage solutions) will leave proprietary solutions in the dust

Silent data corruption will grow apace with capacity and users will increasingly turn to solutions like ZFS to checksum everything in order to maintain file integrity.

Developers, impatient with the snail's pace response of corporate IT to their need for SAN and NAS will turn to solutions such as NexentaStor and other open storage solutions to meet those needs. And then there's the cloud. Developers are learning to make an end run around corporate priorities.

Stay tuned for the next five storage industry driving forces for 2011.

NDMP Implementation Guide for the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance

2011-01-10T17:00:00+01:00

"NDMP Implementation Guide for the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance," an Oracle white paper, describes the implementation and configuration details for Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP) backups on the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance, using such industry-leading backup applications as Oracle Secure Backup 10.3.0.2, Symantec NetBackup 7.0, and EMC Legato Networker 7.6.

Sun Storage 7000 2010.Q3.2.0 Release

2011-01-05T17:00:00+01:00

A new minor update to the Sun Storage 7000 2010.Q3 software has been posted. The release includes more than 60 bug fixes, among them, fixes for a number of ZFS-related panics, improvements to ACL handling and NDMP behavior, and improvements to scalability in the block target management subsystem. Please read the release notes for more details,including a full list of changes. Also, please note that Oracle has shut down the Sun Download Center, so be sure to read and follow the new instructions for obtaining and installing the software, as found on the main software update landing page.

Sun Storage 7000 2010.Q3.1.0 Simulator Release

2010-11-24T17:00:00+01:00

A new Sun Storage 7000 simulator image has been released, bringing the simulator to 2010.Q3.1.0. The simulator image works with VirtualBox and supports the full complement of unified storage features with the exception of clustering. More information on the simulator can be found at the landing page, where readers will learn how Oracle's Unified Storage Simulator makes it possible to install and manage a virtual storage system on any laptop or desktop and experience the power of Open Storage. Note that existing downrev simulator images can be upgraded using the procedure described in the product documentation (included in the simulator and accessible via the browser-based appliance interface); it's not necessary to download the new image, Oracle notes.

RAID-Z at the OpenStorage Summit

2010-11-22T17:00:00+01:00

RAID-Z -- the ZFS implementation of RAID -- was the subject of Adam Leventhal's presentation at the 2010 Open Storage Summit, a presentation he entitled "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About RAID-Z," and that he describes as " ... an accumulation of blog posts and articles written by me and others as well as quite a bit of new material that's been building up." He also calls the talk an overview of RAID-Z's history, a review of its strengths and weaknesses, and a glance at the future challenges ZFS and RAID will have to meet, along with a few suggestions toward solutions and mitigating factors.

Get Your Guide To Simple, Scalable Unified Storage

2010-11-08T17:00:00+01:00

Oracle's next generation Sun ZFS Storage Appliance is the ideal Unified Storage platform for customers facing storage efficiency, capacity and complexity challenges. This innovative platform offers up to 15X more processing power, over 1.6X more density, and unique features like our Flash-based Hybrid Storage Pools and DTrace Analytics for better diagnosing performance and SLA issues.

Learn more by accessing the ZFS Storage Appliance Resource Kit, including this featured IDC White Paper:

Improving Storage Efficiencies with Data Deduplication and Compression - Discover how IT organizations worldwide are dealing with the tremendous growth of data and the complexity of managing the storage for that data.

Many other resources are also available.

Major Software Update for Sun ZFS Storage 7000 Series Appliances

2010-10-07T16:00:00+01:00

There is a major software update for the Sun ZFS Storage 7000 series appliances. 2010.Q3.1.0 offers a number of new features and repairs multiple issues. It is supported on Sun Storage 7110, 7210, 7310, 7410, 7120, 7320, 7420, and the Sun Storage 7000 Simulator. Oracle strongly recommends upgrading to this latest edition. Users should note the first shipping release of 2010.Q3 software is 2010.Q3.1.0.

DDRdrive's X1 Proves Itself a Useful Device in Non-clustering ZFS Roles

2010-09-03T16:00:00+01:00

By hiding the write latency of disks and thereby enabling the use of economical, high-capacity drives, Logzilla, a key component of the ZFS Hybrid Storage Pool, can accelerate synchronous writes, blogger Adam Leventhal observes, conceding at the same time the role played by the fast SAS and SATA SSDs from STEC in the Sun Storage 7000 series. He adds that using SAS-attached SSDs is a simpler and more reliable, though slower, clustering solution than the traditional PCI-attached DRAM device, however.

Some Background Information on Logzilla and Readzilla

2010-08-27T16:00:00+01:00

As the title of his blog, "Fishworks history of SSDs," suggests, Adam Leventhal parts the curtain on some of the deliberations behind bringing the 7000-series enterprise storage solution to fruition. Finding it difficult to realize the desired storage capacity using 7,200 rpm disks, Fishworks turned to the new technology of flash storage. The first solution employing flash was Logzilla, he writes.

RAID-Z is Not RAID-5

2010-07-29T16:00:00+01:00

RAID-Z was designed as a software substitute for the expensive RAID card that has been used in traditional storage and, using its variable width stripes, to overcome the "RAID-5 write hole," writes Fishworks engineer Adam Leventhal in his blog "What is RAID-Z?" For all of that, however, Leventhal suggests that RAID-Z is not the mirror image of RAID-5.

Client Side Partition Alignment and Its Impact on Performance

2010-07-22T16:00:00+01:00

This blog is for users who create and access LUNs from their Sun Unified Storage appliances using either iSCSI or FC and who might not realize the impact on performance that client side partition alignment can exert. Blogger David Lutz characterizes this issue as generic rather than one that involves only Unified Storage appliances but adds, reassuringly, that achieving proper alignment is relatively simple.

J4410 Expansion Module for 7000 Series Storage Appliances

2010-07-15T16:00:00+01:00

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.

Consolidating Eight Storage Systems from Six Vendors into One Unified Storage System

2010-07-07T16:00:00+01:00

Oracle's Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System product line was able to consolidate eight storage systems from six vendors into one unified storage system with a single point of management for an apparel and accessories company. Signature Styles reports significant benefits, including cost savings, increased performance, and simplified storage management with their adoption of the Sun OpenStorage systems.

Minor and Micro Update to Sun Storage 7000 2010.Q1

2010-07-06T16:00:00+01:00

Minor and micro software releases for the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System have been published. The Sun Storage 7000 2010.Q1.2.0 and 2010.Q1.2.1, respectively, contain numerous bug fixes for the Sun Storage 7000 series appliances. For those using deduplication and access-based enumeration, 2010.Q1.20 is an update that should be installed. Fishworks, the engineering team behind the open storage product line Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System, strongly advises those using deduplication or contemplating using deduplication to upgrade.

Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System Product Line Upgraded

2010-06-30T16:00:00+01:00

New enhancements for the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System product line include built-in inline data deduplication that can be combined with inline data compression; 4 and 8 Gbit/sec Fibre Channel protocol support; multiple storage pools; and new 1 and 2 TB SAS disk drives - doubling maximum system capacity to 576TB.

Using External Tables to Load Data into a Data Warehouse

2010-06-18T16:00:00+01:00

A veteran of nearly a year's effort involving Exadata V2 performance projects, Glenn Fawcett blogs on the use of external tables as the fastest method of loading data into a data warehouse. As he writes, "With the size and power of Exadata, businesses are creating larger and larger data warehouses. There will often be dozens of machines that collect and stage data for ingest by the data warehouse. So this means the staging area for these flat-files must be huge, real fast, and accessible from multiple networks." External tables fill the bill, according to Fawcett.

Guide for Installing Oracle Siebel CRM 8 with Sun's Open Storage Systems

2010-05-26T16:00:00+01:00

Abhishek Gupta has authored a guide describing the installation of Oracle Siebel Customer Relationship Management (CRM) 8 software with Oracle's Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems. It can be used to help customers and technical support engineers create proof-of-concept environments for application testing or benchmarking.

Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems for Oracle Databases

2010-05-25T16:00:00+01:00

Learn more about Oracle's Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System in a 9-page white paper that provides an executive overview of the system. The paper offers information on the benefits of Hybrid Storage Pools, Analytics, and fully integrated software, providing specific examples along with charts and figures to demonstrate its points.

RAS and the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems

2010-05-18T16:00:00+01:00

Get a detailed review of the reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) of Oracle's Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems in a technical white paper that looks at each layer of the OpenStorage system and describes additional RAS features provided by Oracle's storage appliance management software, phone home support, and upgrade procedures. Information on Oracle's approach to managing and preventing fault events is also covered.

Looking at Performance Improvements Stemming from ZFS Appliance 2010/Q1

2010-05-11T16:00:00+01:00

In his blog post "Doubling Exchange Performance" Roch "Mars" Bourbonnais lavishes praise on the performance improvements that have resulted from release of the ZFS Appliance 2010/Q1 update. Changes to the ZFS metaslab code now make it possible for 50% improved OLTP performance and 70% reduced variability from run to run, Bouronnais writes. He also notes a 200% improvement on MS Exchange performance from these changes.

Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) on Sun Storage 7000 Systems

2010-05-05T16:00:00+01:00

"Setup, Tuning, Workload Performance Guide for Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) on Sun Storage 7000 Systems" by Sanjay Gianchandani outlines the procedure for configuring the Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) database server to use Oracle's Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems as a storage unit.

The Impact of ZFS Dedup Procedures on System Performance

2010-04-28T16:00:00+01:00

What performance characteristics are we expected to see from ZFS Storage appliance Dedup in the wake of the Sun Storage 7000 2010.Q1, asks Roch "Mars" Bourbonnais rhetorically in the blog "Dedup Performance Considerations." By way of coming up with an answer, he reviews the basics of ZFS dedup operations, then proceeds to an examination of the implications for performance.

Sun Storage 7000 2010.01 Release Integrates with Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS)

2010-04-22T16:00:00+01:00

The Sun Storage 7000 Provider for VSS Software 1.0 is a hardware provider that plugs into the Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) Framework on Microsoft Windows 2003 and 2008, 64-bit or 32-bit variations. The integration with Microsoft VSS is part of the Sun Storage 7000 2010.Q1 release. Paul Monday describes the VSS and how it interacts with the Sun Storage 7000 Appliances.

Minor Update to Sun Storage 7000 2009.Q3 Released

2010-04-14T16:00:00+01:00

Sun Storage 7000 2009.Q3.5.0 is a minor release that contains fixes for several clustering and core I/O issues, writes the Fishworks engineering team on its blog. Release notes have been posted as has the download. It is recommended for all customers running 2009.Q3 who are unable to upgrade to 2010.Q1. However, the 2010.Q1 release supersedes all releases of 2009.Q3, and it is strongly recommended to upgrade to 2010.Q1 instead of any 2009.Q3 release, including this one, if possible.

New Version of the Sun Unified Storage Simulator

2010-04-12T16:00:00+01:00

A new version of the Sun Storage 7000 simulator, now known as Oracle's Sun Unified Storage Simulator, is available with support changes. This release of the simulator provides support for VirtualBox and drops its support for VMware, reports Fishworks Engineer Adam Leventhal. This freely downloadable simulator is a way for users to install and manage a virtual storage system on any laptop or desktop and experience the Oracle-Sun Open Storage.