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How much experience do people here have with Sun's x4500/x4550 (thumper/thor)? I've got one at work and I'm going to be having a lot of stupid little questions, and I'm wondering if I can get them answered here or if I need to go register on the OpenSolaris forums or something.
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Feb 5, 2010 06:00
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Sweet. Now this is probably a stupid question, but I only ask it because the purchase went by at least a few people who should know better... Is it possible to use an iSCSI card to share a target? We don't have a lot of experience with iSCSI here, only having a StorageTek array that acts as an iSCSI target, and an iSCSI card in the server acting as the initiator. Now we've got our thumper, and I know ZFS can export volumes as iSCSI (I actually know a fair amount about ZFS, so I'm not screwed in that regard) but I'm assuming it has to do that over the system network interfaces. The more I think about this, the stupider it sounds like that we got an iSCSI card to share file systems for iSCSI. That's the same as doing something like buying a network card for your hard drive, right? It doesn't make any sense? Also, since you guys manage a bunch of thumpers, what should I tell my boss as to why I shouldn't make 2 20+2 RAIDZ2 pools? I had a hard enough time convicing him to let me use *both* system drives for my root partitions (1 TB? But it has Compact Flash!) and now I'm trying to to use one of these from the 'ZFS Best Practices Guide' code: . 6x(5+2) is never going to fly, too many hot stairs and too much wasted space.
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Feb 5, 2010 20:01
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H110Hawk posted:I've never used iSCSI, but from what I've read about it an "iSCSI card" is nothing more than a glorified networking card with an iSCSI stack inside of it. ZFS handles this internally and you wasted money. I would keep this fact around if they try and lord over you other things they don't understand, as this one is them spending money they shouldn't have. Haha, suckers. quote:In all fairness, it does have a compact flash port. Use it. Hell, use it as a concession to them. Did they buy the support contract with your thumper, even Bronze? Call them suckers up and ask for a best practices configuration on your very first thumper (Of Many!), and if they balk at it call your sales rep and ask them to get it for you. Get it in an email from Sun. Tell them your honest reliability concerns. 3rd of a few. I work for a University in a perpetually poor department. The only time we get thumpers is when big phat grants come in, or when we invent new departments (my current situation). The first thumper has a 1 disk UFS root system, 6 disks in a RAIDZ for one of my bossess tests, and the other is a 23 disks raidz2. No hot spares for either of those pools (not sure where the other 18 disks are). The second thumper has a single UFS root disk, 2 23 disk RAIDZs, and a single hot spare between all of them  My 'boss' doesn't really have much power here, and can in fact be easily over ruled by other people who know better. Except the Solaris admin is gone this week, so it's up to me to be a bastion of sanity. Ironically, the Solaris admin doesn't know much about ZFS, so he defers to my knowledge. So it will go something like this: 'boss' asks Solaris guy, Solaris guy asks me, I tell Solaris guy, Solaris guy tells 'boss', 'boss' tells me to do what I told him to do all along.
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Feb 6, 2010 05:15
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AFAIK all of the 7000 series use ZFS, which if your as  over ZFS as I am, is awesome.
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Mar 3, 2010 20:58
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Serfer posted:Yeah, that's pretty much where it's going. 100% overhead. But still cheaper that way than buying Netapp or EMC. Which reminds me, despite calling a half dozen times, and having a conference with Sun, they never sent me a quote despite promising that it would get there in x<7 days every time I called. I can get a quote from our Sun vendor in a few hours. You've gotta find yourself a local vendor. They're always cheaper than anything we can get directly from Sun or CDWG, although we save money being an EDU.
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Mar 7, 2010 21:59
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EoRaptor posted:Okay, so take two of this: poo poo, I think you might be so close to a low end thumper with that budget, and not that I know anything about enterprise storage, I think it would do most of what you need. Bonus points for getting 24T for your budget. Fake Edit: Oh poo poo, looks like they got rid of the 500GB model on their site, so the 1TB disk model is $50k US.
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Mar 19, 2010 18:43
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Bluecobra posted:I would assume that a backup program like NetBackup would ignore the ZFS de-deduplication and will backup all the files. With ZFS you can create a snapshot, and then use the "zfs send" command to send that snapshot to another host (more info here). It looks like they added a dedup option to zfs send, though this is pretty new. In fact, I am pretty sure that you will need to be on the developer build of Opensolaris to even get ZFS de-duplication so if this for your enterprise, I would just err on the side of caution. The 7000 series is just a ZFS + Fishworks, but Fishworks does add some cost. I would say give Sun a serious look. The X4275 is a 2U box that holds 12 3.5" drives. Get that, throw Solaris on it with some drives and go nuts. There should be something of equivalent size in your budget in the 7000 series.
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Mar 19, 2010 23:28
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EnergizerFellow posted:As mentioned, deduplication on ZFS still hasn't made it out of development builds, AFAIK. That is true. Solaris 10U8 (the most recent) has ZFS version 15 as the max. My OpenSolaris box running the latest devel build goes up to 22. Dedup is in 21. The latest release version of OpenSolaris comes out in a few days and will have dedup, so you can do that if you're comfortable, but otherwise you won't have dedup.
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Mar 20, 2010 00:08
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adorai posted:It will be, and it will be an in place upgrade. The Netapp isn't going to cut it, NFS is a $5k add on on a 2050, I can't imagine it's much cheaper on a 2040. Yeah, I just upgrade my thumper from v10 to v15 (somehow the Jumpstart installs ZFS as v10 instead of the latest).
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Mar 20, 2010 00:18
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I was wondering if anybody could provice a useful link on SAS expanders? I've seen all sorts of SAS cards that say they support 100+ drives, but I don't understand how they do it. Google isn't helpful for once, and I'm just really curious.
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Mar 24, 2010 16:43
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TobyObi posted:So what can people tell me about the Sun X4540? I can't speak for sure, but I don't think you could use it as a FC device. ZFS can share the drives out via iSCSI with the built in NICs, but I don't think you could export a pool over FC.
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Apr 1, 2010 05:29
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StabbinHobo posted:I'm curious to hear other peoples feedback here... I've read somewhere that when making a RAID it's a good idea to make a partition a little bit smaller than the size of the disk, in case you're replacment disk is a few sectors smaller than the failed disk.
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Apr 9, 2010 23:53
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H110Hawk posted:You have to be sure you read the Guaranteed Sector Count on any disk you purchase to replace an existing one. You are correct, it's not the partition size, but the size of whatever "thing" your array sees when building itself. This could be an exported multi-disk device (think raid10), a partition/file (when doing testing of raid subsystems), or the raw block device itself.
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Apr 10, 2010 22:20
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lilbean posted:(Oracle 10 on Solaris SPARC systems Psst, It's Solaris 10 on an Oracle SPARC system.
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May 21, 2010 03:04
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Anyone know a good way to get a Mac to connect to an iSCSI network? There are software initiators, but our Xserve is a piece of poo poo, and I'd rather just get a dedicated card. Does anybody make a card with OSX drivers? I know QLogic doesn't (at least according to their site). Apple seems to be all on board the Fibre Channel bandwagon, and ignoring iSCSI.
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Jul 15, 2010 16:55
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Cultural Imperial posted:Why not just use NFS? RAM, Hahahahahahaha. Like I said, our server is a POS. I think it only has 3 GB. The guy who was paying for it wanted to be a cheapass, and my boss didn't have the balls to tell him to gently caress off, so we turned everything down to -11. We've got like 10T that we can share out via NFS from our thumper, but it's being a bastard in OSX. We were trying to use NFS reshares and that just sucked. Our next step is to try and get each client to mount the NFS share directly from our thumper, instead of from the Xserve. I hate Apple, but I also hate cheapasses.
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Jul 15, 2010 21:10
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NeuralSpark posted:With only 3GB of RAM is it even an Intel box? Maybe it's four. It's brand new, but the guy wouldn't spend more than $2000 (being split 50/50 with another department, so $4000 total) which resulted in the minimum amount of RAM, one of the slowest CPUs, and the smallest hard drives.
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Jul 16, 2010 05:44
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Open ended question, but how do you guys backup large Unix volumes? Right now we're limited to 25 GB Partitions because that's the biggest partition AMANDA can handle within our artificial constraints (level 0 every 14 days, LTO2 tape). Faculty has started rumbling, and our solution is to ??? We've managed to do 50GB Partitions with LTO4 (though I imagine those could be bigger) but I think even that's too small, especially when a few professors have used their grants to buy Terabytes of contiguous storage at once, only to have it split up into tiny useless morsels. We've started using Bakbone with 500GB partitions, but I really hate Bakbone and would really much rather use AMANDA because it deals with all the stupid bullshit way better than Bakbone does.
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Oct 26, 2010 21:34
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Maneki Neko posted:What don't you like about BakBone? I ran that for a while, and although it wasn't obvious how to actually do anything the first time you tried it, it did perform well and was reliable. Coming from AMANDA I'm completely flabbergasted at scheduling. We have two backups for every partition, a full once a week and incremental the other 6 days a week. We have to manually schedule each backup, and make sure that backups don't run at the same time, so each backup is a special flower with a special time to run. This creates hundreds of backup configs and it all just seams insane to me, especially when with AMANDA all I do is say "back these up!" and AMANDA figures it out every night.
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Oct 26, 2010 22:32
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lilbean posted:Wait what? The 4540 was one of the best things Sun ever made. Goddamnit. Jesus gently caress. My boss talked to our Sales Rep, who couldn't get any quotes back from Oracle. So he went straight to the source and apparently got the straight dope. Oracle bought Sun so they could make database appliances. That's it. They don't give a gently caress about anything else.
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Oct 30, 2010 03:23
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skipdogg posted:This sucks. I've got a big project coming up with my engineering team, we basically need to certify our software on Sun hardware for a client and am getting ready to buy some fully decked out T2000 and M4000 series servers. I had a quote from Sun, but it was only good until the Oracle deal closed. Not looking forward to getting a new quote after reading this. Our sales guy with our Reseller can't even get quotes from Oracle. They literally don't want to sell hardware anymore. I wish they'd try and spin off the hardware business into something a bit leaner than the original Sun.
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Oct 31, 2010 02:41
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GrandMaster posted:yeah, we had a similar quote.. decided to go with a sun thumper instead, zfs inline dedupe is out in the next release of solaris They just came out with the 9/10 release, and no dedup. The previous release was 11 months ago. Solaris 11 is coming at us at lightning speed. Not sure how long you're going to be waiting for dedup in Solaris 10.
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Nov 30, 2010 16:07
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Welp, that sure is "special" on Oracle's part. They're probably going to try and make it a big selling point of Solaris 11, which maybe means they'll come out with an Intel thumper? Ans I think the Solaris 11 express is only for evaluation, you can't actually use it in production (but they haven't released Oracle Solaris Studio 12 for it, WTF Oracle?). I'm "evaluating" it at home, which isn't really a lie because I'm learning all sorts of great poo poo that I can use when we go to 11 here at work.
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Nov 30, 2010 20:57
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Sweet, I guess I hope they enjoy violating their own license if they start selling products running Solaris 11 express.Oracle posted:You may not: There's also a section on making sure you don't accidentally GPL Solaris code or something: Oracle posted:Open Source Software
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Nov 30, 2010 21:57
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idolmind86 posted:Guys thanks for all of the responses. I will investigate iSCSI as an alternative avenue. Unfortunately I don't know if we can get away with block level disk access because one of the portions where our product runs into issues is in a shell script, which of course needs file level access. If the script is running on the same host as your $APP then you'll have no problems. As far as your app is concerned, iSCSI is exactly the same as plugging a SATA drive into the computer. Would you have trouble shell scripting on a local drive?
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Dec 8, 2010 18:13
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InferiorWang posted:Just because, here's a crappy visio diagram of what I'm thinking of: You better seal that end pipe, or all your data's going to run into the floor of your DR site.
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Jan 5, 2011 19:57
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Is being a really lovely poster a bannable offense? Because I'm loving tired of szlevi making GBS threads up this thread with his inability to copy/paste.
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Jan 18, 2011 17:50
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So this isn't quite Enterprise level, but if anyone has a Sun StorageTek 2510 (or I guess any 25xx array) I've found a fun little bug (confirmed by an engineer). The batteries have a tendency to very quickly "expire," but resetting the battery age fixes it, until the battery goes into an error state. Of course our ~9 month old battery says it's over 6.5 years old, so maybe our array is just well and truly hosed.
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Feb 4, 2011 02:26
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Bluecobra posted:I just found out that Uncle Larry silently killed off the StorageTek 25xx line of storage. I guess $1,000 2TB disks weren't profitable enough for them. Now I have to go muck around eBay for disks and brackets to upgrade a 2510 array that is less than three years old at one of our remote sites. 4 or 5 months ago, we got, according to your sales rep, the last 2510 brackets in the country. They cost us $200 a piece too. Not sure why Oracle doesn't want to keep that gravy train running.
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Mar 3, 2011 15:46
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Thoughts on Compellent? We just had a meeting a Dell rep. It all sounds pretty awesome, if it works. Odds are we're going to go with a JBOD attached to a server because we're dumb, but it looks cool.
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Jun 8, 2011 22:52
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I have a feeling we'll end up going with JBODs attached to servers and using ZFS, but me and the guy who would mostly be running it are really excited. Meanwhile my boss is trying to get them to donate some old crap (University department) to use to retire some super old (36 GB SCSI disk arrays) and then maybe buy a few more things to add on and ??? We don't really have a plan. We've also been burned on a black box like this before, because we got really unlucky and bought a NAS from Sun/StorageTek which they almost immediatly EOLed, and when a Sun techs came into our machine room to work on something else, he saw that and literally started banging his head on the wall. So we've got a hard time trusting a black box.
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Jun 9, 2011 20:21
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Hok posted:If you create a 4+1 raid 5, it will grab 5 blocks off any disks in any enclosure it decides is suitable and raid them, it will then repeat using blocks from other disks until it has a big enough volume. There's some load balancing and optimization smarts behind it, but that's the basics I'm not 100% on this, but I don't think you even specify you want a 4+1, you just specify that in your tier you want some raid 5 and some raid 10, and the data progression magic figures out how many blocks to to raid 5 and how many to raid 10 so that you get the right speed for your progression. Though I'm not 100% on that, as I wasn't entirely understanding the blocks when he answered my question. As for support, we're in the twin cites, 20-40 minutes away from Eden Prairie, depending on traffic, so hopefully we won't have any problems getting on site service quickly. E: conntrack posted:The compellent system looks cool but the presales from Dell looked miffed when i asked them technical details about their "not mirroring" secret sauce. Our guy new his poo poo. I agree with the poster above, they may just not know yet. The few things our guy didn't know he said he'd forward us the technical docs. Since we're so close, he also offered to set us up with a field trip to HQ so we could interrogate the engineers. FISHMANPET fucked around with this message at 06:44 on Jun 11, 2011 |
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Jun 11, 2011 06:41
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Any thoughts on Sun's 7000 series, specifically the 7120 or the 7320 (as I imagine that's all that would be in our price range? Most of us are on the Compellent side, but one guy is super on the Oracle side, so we basically have to fight against Oracle for this. Would something like that work well as a VMWare Image store? How much access to the OS does the 7000 series give?
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Jun 16, 2011 05:37
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Intraveinous posted:The word "Oracle" just leaves a bad taste in my mouth in general. I know it's Sun kit, but once you buy it, you're at the whim of Oracle deciding whether or not to continue supporting it, and honestly, you're not getting much of anything you can't get with a white box (besides Oracle's "outstanding" support [/sarcasm]. I like ZFS, and run white box ZFS implementations both at home and work. I know you said you'd been burned by white box implementations before, so really the questions are: How much time are you going to be able to spend learning the ins and outs to really know the system, and how much turnover do you have in your IT department? If you'll be the primary one supporting the system, and it will be your primary function (so you'll know it like the back of your hand) there's less to fear. If it will be dumped off on a contractor or something, even something with Oracle's support will be better. It's all very political, of course, but to make it simple... We've been a Sun shop for about forever. We've gotten burnt by StorageTek (right after Sun bought them) blackbox unit. However, despite that, one of our managers (who used to be the Solaris admin until he got promoted to management, but he's still below our big boss, and shouldn't care, becuase he won't be running it. It also took him 4 years to get our StorageTek NAS into production [yes, 4 years]) wants to keep going the Sun/Oracle route. The guy who actually is going to run it, and me, are in favor of Compellent. We have the money either way most likely, it's just a matter of convincing the big boss that the Oracle solution probably isn't very good. We've also been burned recently by Oracle support, so really not sure why we would even consider it. If the 7000 series is a blackbox, that's a knock against it. The big boss is basically deciding between Compellent or some Dell servers with MD1200 arrays connected to them, running ZFS. The need to discredit Oracle comes from the third party that has way too much influence. That White Paper looks good, even if it took some serious drug deals to get a copy of it. The link you posted didn't work, so I snipped the end off and got a registration page, registered and got a link, and that just gave me a header png hosted on dropbox. Googled for the paper, found the link on the DCIG site, registered with NEXSAN, the link they gave me 404ed, googled the file name, and found a copy: http://www.adn.de/media/CMS_Bilder/Nexsan/2010_DCIG_Midrange_Array_Buyers_Guide.pdf I'll have to keep an eye out for the 2011 buyer's guide.
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Jun 16, 2011 17:41
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HorusTheAvenger posted:Ask Oracle if the bug still exists that you have to manually reset the service processor every 30 days. Does it require rebooting the whole machine? That bug existed on an x4500. SP was locked up and wouldn't so something properly, it was fixed in a firmware upgrade, upgrade required a reboot of the machine. We probably still haven't fixed whatever was wrong, and I found that bug years ago.
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Jun 17, 2011 06:12
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Bluecobra posted:I wonder if Oracle is going to ax their LSI-based StorageTek gear now: I've got another meeting today, this time with our local Oracle reseller. It will be completely unproductive, because the question I want answered is "What the hell is Oracle doing?" and he won't have any idea either.
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Jun 30, 2011 15:48
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FISHMANPET posted:I've got another meeting today, this time with our local Oracle reseller. It will be completely unproductive, because the question I want answered is "What the hell is Oracle doing?" and he won't have any idea either. Welp, he brought 3 Oracle sales engineers, and they assure us that they have a plan, but they can't show it to us until we sign an NDA.
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Jul 4, 2011 01:24
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Misogynist posted:To be fair, this is basically SOP for any vendor, and Sun would have told you the exact same thing prior to the Oracle buyout (I had to sign an NDA for their HPC roadmap back in '08). I'm actually surprised they didn't automatically bring along the appropriate presentation along with the NDAs for your staff to sign, though, given that they surely knew the nature of the meeting. Still, I'd blame it on lovely reps rather than (outlandishly) lovely corporate policy. They also agreed to come in and give us a "brown bag" (whatever the gently caress that means) presentation on how to game Oracle support to get actual support. So basically, they at least claim to have fixed my biggest problems. It was so much easier when I could blindly hate Oracle, but then I get put in a meeting where I discuss Solaris Express build numbers with the engineer on the phone 
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Jul 4, 2011 16:47
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quackquackquack posted:(Channel your inner 80s Australian) That's not documentation. THIS is documentation: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sour...rL_7TnzQkteFWAA They were even nice enough to include something to cute out and stick in the spine of your half inch 3 ring binder so you can identify what it is you just wasted 160 pages on easily.
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Aug 25, 2011 23:41
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I got handed a pair of machines each with 16 2TB drives, running Solaris 10. Guess how the drives are setup. 16 disk RAIDZ1. I'm supposed to get them mirroring to each other and comment on how I feel about them, except for the drive layout. My gut tells me this is the stupidest loving thing ever and almost guarantees data loss, but can anyone point to some hard data I can use to shame the idiot who set this up, and hopefully get it fixed? The justification from my boss (not the one who set it up) is that since we're going to mirror the machines (with a nightly ZFS send/receive) that it doesn't matter if a machine goes down because of hard drive death. Nevermind that the act of syncing back 30TB of data is sure to kick of a couple dead disks in your backup array, but gently caress, what do I know.
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Oct 18, 2011 14:49
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