Report: Sun Open Storage

Tue Nov 18 09:41:30 UTC 2008

On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 10:18 AM, Onno Benschop <onno at itmaze.com.au> wrote:
> Today I attended a Sun presentation called "Open Storage Systems". I
> attended both for my "day-job", that is, an IT consultant, as well as
> wearing my "Ubuntu Server hat". I'm not able to provide you with a
> word-for-word, blow-by-blow account of my morning, nor am I wanting to
> either promote or bag the presentation. The intent of my email to the
> group is to report on a development that I thought might
> interact/intersect or be of interest to the team.
>
> Some disclaimers up front. I am an IT consultant, that is, I solve weird
> and wonderful problems for weird and wonderful clients all around the
> world, but mostly rural and remote Australia. I've been in this industry
> for over 26 years, so I'm probably a lot cynical about "revolutionary"
> things. I've never bought any Sun hardware, though a Sparc station did
> land on my desk some years ago where I coerced it into running Debian at
> the time. I've never deployed a storage system, never bought one and
> until recently never needed one. If anything in what I write here is
> contradicted by what Sun says, perhaps you should ask Sun before relying
> on what I said.
>
> The presentation attracted me because it was touted as an Open Source
> solution and I was interested to know how Sun was dealing with this and
> how this might relate to anything I was doing either as a consultant or
> as a member of the server team.
>
> The opening remarks were along the lines of "each CPU in a data centre
> achieves about 15% utilisation, and each storage solution is closed,
> proprietary, firmware driven hardware that requires additional licenses
> and subscriptions to activate new features. Sun has a solution that is
> open and will save you up to 90% in your storage deployments".
>
> At this point I thought, cool, let's see what you got.
>
> The release discussed the Sun Storage 7000 series which is basically a
> Sun box that runs Open Solaris that offers a web-based GUI that allows
> you to manage this. The drives are spread among SATA/SAS/SSD (and if I
> recall correctly, SCSI as well). A big deal was made of the time that it
> takes to get data off a drive and how SSD storage in between the CPU and
> the drive would handle this by caching the data in smart ways. (This is
> being handled by ZFS.)
>
> The box is built using Intel and/or AMD processors - the talk was
> sponsored by AMD, but I was unclear if the Intel reference was
> compatibility, as in an AMD processor that is compatible, or if it was
> because Intel also contributes hardware - in any case, I don't think it
> matters that much - but I'm sure that there are some reading this who
> are cringing at that thoughtless remark - I'm sorry, educate me please :)
>
> Much was made of services that can be activated, NFS, CIFS, HTTP, FTP,
> WebDAV, DNS, NTP, AntiVirus and many others.
>
> The box is "certified" for MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft, VMware, blah, blah.
> (More on that later.) It does iSCSI, block-level stuff, fibre-channel,
> and other (mumble) protocols. So it's able to do the same as all the
> other storage systems in the world. There are web pages that describe
> this and a quick google found this one:
> http://blogs.sun.com/studler/entry/new_class_of_storage_systems.
>
> The web GUI is cute. It shows hardware level information, showing which
> DIMM is faulty, allowing you to put a blinking light on a drive to get
> the engineer on-site to swap out a drive, serial numbers, etc. Logging
> is continuous and data is stored on a system partition. Analysis can be
> done over this data and information can be exported via CSV. There is
> cool stuff, you can repartition a system from mirrored to raid 6 in
> seconds, build a new system in less than 5 minutes from new, comes with
> lots of expansion options and appears to be well placed when compared to
> other "Enterprise" stuff. Much of this functionality appears to me be
> related to ZFS and not the web GUI as such - but I might be wrong.
>
> The pitch for this seemed to be that this device can replace a whole lot
> of infrastructure and because it's open it grows with the developer
> community - (that's "us Open Source folks").
>
> At this point we got a demo and some point-and-click action.
>
> Then the presentation was over and we got to ask questions.
>
> My questions related to some of what was said and I opened up with "How
> do I interface this with other stuff? As in, how do I use my software to
> talk to your hardware?" The response was not good. Basically, you need
> to use their web-interface.
>
> I asked about web services. Most web-sites these days are not static
> files, with a web-server on board, how would I deploy a PHP or a PYTHON
> based web application and how does this relate to the HTTP server on
> board? The response was that I should run my own web-server hardware and
> mount the "appliance" across the network using NFS or CIFS. I began to
> wonder what the purpose of the web-server compatibility and service was.
>
> If I used Active Directory or LDAP to authenticate user share access,
> could I use the same infrastructure to manage the actual shares, that
> is, could I define and manage my shares in LDAP and have the appliance
> use that information. "Sure, you'll need to write the software to do
> that, but sure - actually, the answer wasn't that at all, it was 'uhm,
> dunno, uhm not in this release.'"
>
> If I want to manage the thing using HP OpenView, or anything not Sun,
> could I do that? "Sure, but you'd need to write your own software to
> manage that - actually the answer was, no, but I suppose you could write
> software to do that, it's using Open Solaris and the APIs are published."
>
> If I wanted to have a fail over system, could I do that at a block
> level? "No, not in this release."
>
> How is the Oracle and MySQL certification? "Well, you mount the drive
> and it's certified."
>
> So, if I log-in and add a service, what does that do to my service
> agreement? "It voids your agreement."
>
> So, if I cannot talk to anything not Sun and I cannot install anything
> on the device, how is this Open Source? "Well, you need to know that
> it's running Open Solaris, so you can build your own system like this
> and run with that, but you won't get the web GUI and none of the
> integration."
>
> So, coming in the door thinking, wow, Sun has an Open Storage system
> that might be able to be managed and deployed in a Ubuntu Server
> environment, I went out the door thinking, Sun has built a system that
> could be really nice, but instead they've built another proprietary
> solution that doesn't really talk to anything else and cannot really be
> managed in anything but a single deployment.
>
> So, the 15% CPU utilisation is still the same, you cannot use the Sun
> based server to run anything because it voids your support contract and
> it doesn't talk to anything without voiding your contract.
>
> Afterwards I had lunch with a guy from LSI where we discussed iSCSI
> block level devices also made by Sun. I need to deploy a Windows machine
> to manage it and I need to deploy a front end to talk to users.
>
> So, I suppose you could format the hard-drive(s) on this 7000 series
> hardware and install Ubuntu Server, but that seems to miss the point.
> (One answer involved installing Windows on the machine :)
>
> I'm left with a feeling that I'm unsure how and if we could (or should)
> evolve Ubuntu Server to integrate with systems like this to make Ubuntu
> more enterprise ready.
>
> It's entirely possible that I've got a distorted picture of I.T. in my
> head, one where you can manage your storage in a central location,
> regardless of where the actual drive is, that you can refer to it almost
> as a cloud and manage the various aspects in an almost transparent
> fashion, but thus far this does not appear to be the case.
>
> I don't know if I did the Sun presentation justice, I'm not a journalist
> and I have a bias, but I hope that this gives more people information
> about something I attended. If others have seen presentations that they
> feel relate to the Ubuntu-Server community, I'd personally love to read
> other reports which would allow me to "virtually" attend more
> presentations across more areas.
>
> --
> Onno Benschop
>
> Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06" - E115°50'39" (Yokine, WA)
> --
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> ITmaze   -   ABN: 56 178 057 063   -  ph: 04 1219 8888   -   onno at itmaze.com.au
>
>
>
> --

Thank you for sharing this with us. It's sure inspirational, but
getting to the dissapointments you shared further down the line, I
think to myself. Isn't easier to just build your own storage
applience? I mean, there are so many open source project which allow
you to setup a NFS / SAMBA / SAN / etc server within a few minutes
from the CD, onto any hardware.

How more difficult will it be to use SSD (which is still very
expensive) to run & manage the OS on the device, and then also have
all the capabilities of this Sun device?

-- 

Kind Regards
Rudi Ahlers