Seems like Sun is really kicking butt lately. A year ago I wouldn't have believed it, but that just shows again how little I know. First they released a sub $1000 SunFire X2100 1U server that looks really sweet. And now plans have been revealed for a massive storage monster called Thumper:The 4U high system will hold two dual-core Opterons and support up to 16GB of memory. A more unique part of the server will be Sun's use of 48 SATA drives. Holy cow. And the key to utilizing all that storage is a new filesystem, ZFS, that will be included in Solaris 10. ZFS sounds *really* amazing. The sort of thing that might make someone consider some really expensive Sun gear. Only now their gear isn't expensive any more. Lookin' good Sun.
ZFS sounds really cool: ZFS presents a pooled storage model that completely eliminates the concept of volumes and the associated problems of partitions, provisioning, wasted bandwidth and stranded storage. Thousands of filesystems can draw from a common storage pool, each one consuming only as much space as it actually needs. The combined I/O bandwidth of all devices in the pool is available to all filesystems at all times.
All operations are copy-on-write transactions, so the on-disk state is always valid. There is no need to fsck(1M) a ZFS filesystem, ever. Every block is checksummed to prevent silent data corruption, and the data is self-healing in replicated (mirrored or RAID) configurations. If one copy is damaged, ZFS will detect it and use another copy to repair it.
ZFS introduces a new data replication model called RAID-Z. It is similar to RAID-5 but uses variable stripe width to eliminate the RAID-5 write hole (stripe corruption due to loss of power between data and parity updates). All RAID-Z writes are full-stripe writes. There's no read-modify-write tax, no write hole, and — the best part — no need for NVRAM in hardware. ZFS loves cheap disks. That sounds almost too good to be true.
Sun has been working with Newisys as a HW supplier of mutlicore/multichip Opteron systems that are sold under the Sun brand with Sun software. I'm quite familiar with the 4300-E, a dual-core quad Opteron beast. I wonder if Thumper is entirely homegrown, or if they're continuing the relationship with Newisys.
"...the system's [thumper's] design originally took place well before that at Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim's start-up Kealia..." But I'm not sure if that means Sun bought Kealia, or whether they are working with them, or what.
Nice look at the problems of file storage (I've been thinking about this a lot as I put together a rather large file server) and the promise of ZFS from one of my favorite tech writers.
The X2100 came up on the CentOS list, and someone very knowledgeable thought it wasn't a great server box: "The SunFire x2100 uses the nForce4 Ultra -- a desktop chipset!
_No_ PCI-X and only PCIe. It's definitely _not_ a server chipset.
Especially it's GbE -- it has only a very small SRAM cache." Not sure if a less than optimal gigabit ethernet setup is that big of a deal to someone like me who is just putting it behind a 100 mb/s switch and don't ever expect to burst much over 10 mb/s. But I do trust this guys opinion, so I thought I would mention it.
In depth look at ZFS from a Sun blog: End-to-end data integrity requires that each data block be verified against an independent checksum, after the data has arrived in the host's memory. It's not enough to know that each block is merely consistent with itself, or that it was correct at some earlier point in the I/O path. Our goal is to detect every possible form of damage, including human mistakes like swapping on a filesystem disk or mistyping the arguments to dd(1). (Have you ever typed "of=" when you meant "if="?)
According to this message posted to the ZFS mailing list, "Chris Emura, the Filesystem Development Manager within Apple's CoreOS organization is interested in porting ZFS to OS X."
I want that.
Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz introduces Thumper on his blog. I still want it. Damn. 48 drives in 4U (that's 24 terabytes with 500 GB drives.) Damn.
My favorite Digg comment from Miniman:
*Fires up Bittorrent*
ITS GO TIME.
Maybe thumper is not such a great deal after all. I didn't know there was already a 48 drive 4U case on the market. Still, the cool thing about the Sun offering is the hardware + software (especially ZFS) package. So maybe it's worth a little premium. I'd want to do a lot more research though if I was actually in the market for such a thing.
Kealia: Yes, Sun bought them a couple of years back.
Xyratex box: watch out for an appls vs oranges comparison there, looks like its just storage and not a full server. That ZFS makes a world of difference too.
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- jim 11-17-2005 8:00 pm
ZFS sounds really cool:
That sounds almost too good to be true.- jim 11-18-2005 3:00 am
Sun has been working with Newisys as a HW supplier of mutlicore/multichip Opteron systems that are sold under the Sun brand with Sun software. I'm quite familiar with the 4300-E, a dual-core quad Opteron beast. I wonder if Thumper is entirely homegrown, or if they're continuing the relationship with Newisys.
- mark 11-18-2005 3:35 am
"...the system's [thumper's] design originally took place well before that at Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim's start-up Kealia..." But I'm not sure if that means Sun bought Kealia, or whether they are working with them, or what.
- jim 11-18-2005 3:39 am
Nice look at the problems of file storage (I've been thinking about this a lot as I put together a rather large file server) and the promise of ZFS from one of my favorite tech writers.
- jim 11-23-2005 12:45 am
The X2100 came up on the CentOS list, and someone very knowledgeable thought it wasn't a great server box:
Not sure if a less than optimal gigabit ethernet setup is that big of a deal to someone like me who is just putting it behind a 100 mb/s switch and don't ever expect to burst much over 10 mb/s. But I do trust this guys opinion, so I thought I would mention it.- jim 11-25-2005 7:03 pm
In depth look at ZFS from a Sun blog:
- jim 12-10-2005 6:47 pm
According to this message posted to the ZFS mailing list, "Chris Emura, the Filesystem Development Manager within Apple's CoreOS organization is interested in porting ZFS to OS X."
I want that.
- jim 4-29-2006 7:07 pm
Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz introduces Thumper on his blog. I still want it. Damn. 48 drives in 4U (that's 24 terabytes with 500 GB drives.) Damn.
My favorite Digg comment from Miniman:
*Fires up Bittorrent*
ITS GO TIME.
- jim 7-12-2006 3:10 am
Maybe thumper is not such a great deal after all. I didn't know there was already a 48 drive 4U case on the market. Still, the cool thing about the Sun offering is the hardware + software (especially ZFS) package. So maybe it's worth a little premium. I'd want to do a lot more research though if I was actually in the market for such a thing.
- jim 7-15-2006 9:27 pm
Kealia: Yes, Sun bought them a couple of years back. Xyratex box: watch out for an appls vs oranges comparison there, looks like its just storage and not a full server. That ZFS makes a world of difference too.
- Webmink 7-16-2006 2:57 am