Saturday 3 January 2009

4 Minute SAN - SUN Fishworks

Well holidays are nearly over, i have had a chance to play with a view Virtual Storage Appliances, one being a EMC Cellera simulator http://www.emc.com/products/family/celerra-family.htm which is all setup, i just need to configure and finish off with some LUN creations etc.

Next one to play with is a VSA built by the SUN FISHworks team
http://wikis.sun.com/display/FishWorks/Fishworks, this is a bizzare name for a team, although I am sure the teams i've run/work in have been named worse over the years. The actual official name is the "SUN Unified storage systems" http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/unified_storage/.

The basis of the SUN USS is that they offer NFS/CIFs and iSCSI protocol connectivity in a commodity SUN physical server running there new Open source OS OpenSolaris under the hood.

Nothing particularly new on the HW concept, however the underlying filesystem utilise ZFS, this provides a larger amount of benefits such as decouplement of the underlying HW to the ZFS volume, this provides benefits such as adding more disk to the pool dynamically, greater scalability for size of volumes (some could say unlimited) and great snapshot benefits etc. Not sure what can be done on disk removal though...

On the GUI side, the USS has great diagnostic facilities available, with Solaris being under the hood the use of Dtrace is available to perform enhanced debug on the storage device and volumes and also the other IO which affects storage.

This opens up a lot of opportunity if this adoption works for SUN, a lot of people have Solaris with Veritas Volume manager which they are just itching to get rid of (hope my account manager doesn't read this), they are making this an Open standard which is great for smaller shops. The USS can i presume run on any Solaris Tin, now just think of this running with a high end M Series...

So early days of playing and reading up so excuse the vagueness, I Will top up sometime through the week on this in more detail if SUN are still in business ;)

The VSA is easily downloadable from SUN http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/unified_storage/resources.jsp and installed on my MAC with VMware fusion, it run's "OK" on the standard 1GB of RAM, I will probably piss about with more RAM on my main PC when I get a chance. And as my subject title says it take about 4 Minutes to configure!!!!

Happy playing



Comments:
Dan, Let me know if you need a copy of the EMC Celerra VSA installation and configuration document.

Thanks,

Bernie
baker_bernard@emc.com
 

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