Perimeter recently bought a 22TB single-controller model of Sun’s new 7410 model storage to replace an aging NetApp that was being used for email, VMWare, home directories and other network storage.
The 7410 promises similar speeds, performance and features to the NetApp model line we were looking at as a replacement. The 7410 uses mostly SATA disk, with some SSD drives to take advantage of the ZFS drive cache features. This has been promoted by Sun as providing quite significant performance enhancements. The main selling factor for us was that the Sun 7410 model comes in at a fraction of the price with 4 times the storage than the NetApp product as there are no software licenses to purchase and the hardware itself is cheaper.
So I get the joys and fun of devoting all my time over the next week to “test” the 7410. It’s obvious it fits our requirements for our environment… it’s got over double the storage capacity we need and is at least twice as fast as the NetApp we are replacing even before we add the SSD cache in.
The one issue I have with the particular model we bought is that it is not fully redundant. It could be if we spent twice as much money on it. All one needs to do is purchase a second controller and a second J4400, connect them together and voila, fully redundant. However, our server room racks are full, our UPS is full, it wasn’t budgeted for, and management doesn’t see this as an issue. Full IT outages as we upgrade firmware and OS on storage and network devices are common at Perimeter Institute. The NetApp solutions we were looking at were not fully redundant either.
I have been trying to figure out what use 14TB of formatted disk is when you only have it for a week. Although JetStress and IOZone can be run for a very long time, however I only really need to run them for a day for my purposes. I suppose I can start migrating data such as VMWare images to the 7410 early and see if anyone notices, but it just seems like there should be something more fun for me to do with it in the meantime.
Erman Ulusoy | 19-Mar-09 at 10:45 am | Permalink
Hello,
we’ll buy a new storage (possibly 7410) for our company.
We’ll use it mostly as file server, mail, archiving etc.. (for disaster recovery purpose we’ll buy a second one for another site) So I would like to know more about the performance.
Thank you
Serdar Kaya | 01-Apr-09 at 9:15 am | Permalink
We are discussing about this product too. I will be glad if you can add more information about performance issues. Thanks
jjstautt | 01-Apr-09 at 12:12 pm | Permalink
See http://joe.stauttener.com/2009/04/01/sun-unified-storage-7410-put-into-production/