I joined the Solaris Kernel Group in 2001 at what turned out to be a remarkableplace and time for the industry. More by luck and intuition than by premonition,I...
I joined the Solaris Kernel Group in 2001 at what turned out to be a remarkableplace and time for the industry. More by luck and intuition than by premonition,I found myself surrounded by superlative engineers working on revolutionarytechnologies that were the products of their own experience and imaginationrather than managerial fiat. I feel very lucky to have worked with Bryan andMike on DTrace; it was amazing that just down the hall our colleagues reinventedthe operating...
I joined the Solaris Kernel Group in 2001 at what turned out to be a remarkableplace and time for the industry. More by luck and intuition than by premonition,I found myself surrounded by superlative...
This year's flash memory summit got me thinking about our use of SSDs over the years at Fishworks. The picture of our left is a visual history of SSD evals in...
This year's flash memory summit got me thinking about our use of SSDs over the years at Fishworks. The picture of our left is a visual history of SSD evals in rough chronological order from the oldest at the bottom to the newest at the top (including some that have yet to see the light of day).Early DaysWhen we started Fishworks, we were inspired by the possibilities presented by ZFS and Thumper. Those components would be key building blocks in the enterprise storage solution...
This year's flash memory summit got me thinking about our use of SSDs over the years at Fishworks. The picture of our left is a visual history of SSD evals in rough chronological order from the oldest...
On the heels of the 2010.Q1 software release, we've provided a new version of the Sun Storage 7000 simulator that can be found at this new location. As noted...
On the heels of the 2010.Q1 software release, we've provided a new version of the Sun Storage 7000 simulator that can be found at this new location. As noted previously, the simulator is a terrific way to take the Sun Storage 7000 user interface for a spin; it includes the exact same software as a physical 7000 series system with the same features.The last release of the simulator added support for VirtualBox; this release now removes support for VMware. VMware...
On the heels of the 2010.Q1 software release, we've provided a new version of the Sun Storage 7000 simulator that can be found at this new location. As noted previously, the simulator is a terrific...
When I first wrote about triple-parity RAID in ZFS and the Sun Storage 7000 series, I alluded a looming requirement for triple-parity RAID due to a growing...
When I first wrote about triple-parity RAID in ZFS and the Sun Storage 7000 series, I alluded a looming requirement for triple-parity RAID due to a growing disparity between disk capacity and throughput. I've written an article in ACM Queue examining this phenomenon in detail, and making the case for triple-parity RAID. Dominic Kay helped me sift through hard drive data for the past ten years to build a model for how long it takes to fully populate a drive. I've reproduced a...
When I first wrote about triple-parity RAID in ZFS and the Sun Storage 7000 series, I alluded a looming requirement for triple-parity RAID due to a growing disparity between disk capacity and...
The Hybrid Storage Pool integrates flash into the storage hierarchy in two specific ways: as a massive read cache and as fast log devices. For read cache...
The Hybrid Storage Pool integrates flash into the storage hierarchy in two specific ways: as a massive read cache and as fast log devices. For read cache devices, Readzillas, there's no need for redundant configurations; it's a clean cache so the data necessarily also resides on disk. For log devices, Logzillas, redundancy is essential, but how that translates to their configuration can be complicated. How to decide whether to stripe or mirror?ZFS intent log devicesLogzillas...
The Hybrid Storage Pool integrates flash into the storage hierarchy in two specific ways: as a massive read cache and as fast log devices. For read cache devices, Readzillas, there's no need...
Today we shipped our 2009.Q3 release. Amidst the many great new features, enhancements and bug fixes, we've added new storage profiles for triple-parity RAID...
Today we shipped our 2009.Q3 release. Amidst the many great new features, enhancements and bug fixes, we've added new storage profiles for triple-parity RAID and three-way mirroring. Here's an example on a 9 JBOD system of what you'll see in the updated storage configuration screen:Note that the new Triple parity RAID, wide stripes option replaces the old Double parity RAID, wide stripes configuration. With RAID stripes that can easily be more than 40 disks wide, and resilver...
Today we shipped our 2009.Q3 release. Amidst the many great new features, enhancements and bug fixes, we've added new storage profiles for triple-parity RAID and three-way mirroring. Here's an example...
At the Flash Memory Summit today, Sun's own Michael Cornwell delivered a keynote excoriating the overall direction of NAND flash and SSDs. In particular, he...
At the Flash Memory Summit today, Sun's own Michael Cornwell delivered a keynote excoriating the overall direction of NAND flash and SSDs. In particular, he spoke of the "lithography death march" as NAND vendors push to deliver the most cost-efficient solution while making huge sacrifices in reliability and performance.On Wednesday, August 12, I'll be giving two short talks as part of sessions on flash-enabled power savings and data center applications:8:30 - 9:45 Power...
At the Flash Memory Summit today, Sun's own Michael Cornwell delivered a keynote excoriating the overall direction of NAND flash and SSDs. In particular, he spoke of the "lithography death march" as...
Today we're introducing a new member to the Sun Unified Storage family: the Sun Storage 7310. The 7310 is a scalable system from 12TB with a single...
Today we're introducing a new member to the Sun Unified Storage family: the Sun Storage 7310. The 7310 is a scalable system from 12TB with a single half-populated J4400 JBOD up to 96TB with 4 JBODs. You can combine two 7310 head units to form a cluster. The base configuration includes a single quad-core CPU, 16GB of DRAM, a SAS HBA, and two available PCIe slots for NICs, backup cards, or the Fishworks cluster card. The 7310 can be thought of as a smaller capacity, lower cost...
Today we're introducing a new member to the Sun Unified Storage family: the Sun Storage 7310. The 7310 is a scalable system from 12TB with a single half-populated J4400 JBOD up to 96TB with 4 JBODs....
As flash memory has become more and more prevalent in storage from the consumer to theenterprise people have been charmed by the performance characteristics,...
As flash memory has become more and more prevalent in storage from the consumer to theenterprise people have been charmed by the performance characteristics, but get stuck on the longevity. SSDs based on SLC flash are typically rated at 100,000 to 1,000,000 write/erase cycles while MLC-based SSDs are rated for significantly less. For conventional hard drives, the distinct yet similar increase in failures over time has long been solved by mirroring (or other redundancy...
As flash memory has become more and more prevalent in storage from the consumer to theenterprise people have been charmed by the performance characteristics, but get stuck on the longevity. SSDs based...
