Comments on: The enterprise and open-source storage

By: Jesse

Jesse — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 03:29:14 +0000

Centerra - largely a “cheap” storage solution supported by a comprehensive software package. It’s a great option for archival and would probably be suitable for a high-bandwidth archiving application if it was capable of…well, higher bandwidth.

Support and resiliency - that’s a great way to put it. You might be able to put together a solution that is resilient through multiple Raid levels. (ID Software Raid-5 striped across hardware Raid-5 or something equally complex) but you’re still the one getting the page at 4am when the system jumps the shark.

Personally I’d pay big money *NOT* to be the one getting the page at 4am. Especially if it’s someone else’s money.
I prefer the casual email the following morning from EMC stating - “A drive went bad, we fixed it, no host impact.”

By: Steve Chalmers

Steve Chalmers — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:06:43 +0000

Sitting in an obscure corner of the Gates building on the Stanford campus is a computer motherboard and some disks in an enclosure made of Legos. It’s protected in a display case, of course. That was Google’s first computer.

Up 101 in Mountain View in the computer museum is a rack, with flimsy sheet metal trays to which computer motherboards (and disks) are attached. That’s Google’s first cluster.

I work in the storage business, and have never set foot at Google. Best we can tell, nearly all of Google’s business today is run off of huge clusters of client motherboards + client disks, attached to trays descended from what’s in the computer museum. If a tray fails, the software works around it by rerouting work to one of the trays with a duplicate of its data.

Compared to that solution, the Tyan motherboard, external SATA controller, InfiniBand, and probably premium SATA disks would seem gold plated. And most importantly in financial services where milliseconds matter, those enterprise array controllers don’t add their millisecond (or yes, these days, even a tenth of a millisecond) to the latency of an I/O.

Oh, and the Thumper would cost far more than the Tyan homebrew. Still vastly less than a DMX or competitor.

From the point of view of preserving my job, those kinds of solutions scare me. But the software cost of developing them is quite high, and having a person on site with both skills and parts to repair is also expensive. So for now I sleep at night.

By: Karl Lewis

Karl Lewis — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 19:48:30 +0000

SUN’s acquisition of Lustre has the potential to make them the risin star (pun intended) of scalable, commodity storage. Combining Lustre’s ability to scale performance across nodes with ZFS’ immense scalability and rich feature set adds up to a rich product set. I’ve heard people refer to this mythical combination as “the death-knell of enterprise storage vendors”. Being able to use cost-effective Thumpers as storage bricks and combine them in interesting, automated ways will certainly make users think twice about their next storage purchase. But, who knows if this product combination will ever exist?

By: Carter George

Carter George — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 04:39:42 +0000

Sun’s Thumper is a perfectly good feature-rich Unix file system. There are others like it, but combined with Sun’s strong and reasonably-priced Thumper hardware, it’s an all around good middle-of-the-road storage solution. What’s amazing to me is the positive spin on ZFS - it’s just a well-featured single node Unix file system. Better than the free ones you get with Linux, but it’s not clustered, not distributed, does not have a global namespace to stitch together “bricks” of commodity storage in to a unified fault tolerant whole. It’s none of those things.
What will be far more challenging to the existing enterprise status quo is that the big boys are all bringing out scalable commodity storage offeringsof their own, ones that will undermine the margins of their own high-end Enterprise storage platforms. EMC has announced Hulk and Maui, and is even shipping Hulk, if not the more elusive Maui. IBM is readying XIV. HP has announced their CFS-based Extreme Data Storage built on Proliant blades. There are your top three technology vendors, period, launching scalable, commodity based storage platforms. It’s one thing for Ibrix, Isilon, Panasas, and PolyServe to bring those things to market - it’s another when it’s HP, IBM, and EMC. So the landscape is changing, and the relentless drive to commodity price points that wiped out the Enterprise Server 5 years ago is indeed about to start on storage.