Comments on: Sun Unified Storage 7410 put into production

By: jjstautt

jjstautt — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 13:18:34 +0000

That sounds low, but it’s been a while since I’ve looked at this. On the 7410, how you define the various properties of the iSCSI share (Data Compression, Checksum, etc) will affect the speed. You will want to ensure a minimum 1Gbps link between your windows hosts and the 7410. A 100Mb/s network link would be akin to slapping an IDE drive into your server from 10 years ago. Also, check the processor usage on your server. Unless you have an iSCSI HBA, all the iSCSI processing will be done in the CPU.

By: Tony Parsonage

Tony Parsonage — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 06:33:20 +0000

Hi again,

I have had a “quick quick” moment from my boss to put this 7410 in. I have allowed iSCSI access from windows servers to use as a temporary measure but noticed that the disk iops average was approximately 116 ops per second? Is this good? Does anybody have any standard settings for connections from windows servers using iSCSI. (This is not a DB server)

Regards
Tony

By: Trevayne O'Brien

Trevayne O'Brien — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 08:27:11 +0000

Anyone having CIFS operation timeouts or dropouts? on the SUN 7410

By: jjstautt

jjstautt — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:38:54 +0000

You are correct Charles. You can split the disks into two pools with the J4400 and use that between two different controllers. This setup would be much more redundant than what Perimeter bought. I would ask Sun some very hard questions about if the internals of the J4400 are fully redundant before doing this though. I haven’t done this research so I can’t tell you.

By: Charles Soto

Charles Soto — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 16:19:21 +0000

We just racked a 7410 clustered configuration. I’m waiting on new 10gig switches before we go production, however. The single-head version we tested only had 10 drives, but I was getting similar high performance (about the maximum I would expect with 1Gig LACP connections all around). This is going to replace our old Dell/EMC CX3-40, which costs almost as much to renew the support contract as it was to buy the X7410 (well, single-head – we decided the extra few $K would serve us for availability).

I think you may be incorrect about the need for a second J4400 array. The array is dually-attached. Each controller can see the pools configured on it. Yes, only one controller can currently “own” a pool, so if you want real active/active, you have to have at least two POOLs, but that can be done on one array. Ideally, yes, you’ll want twice as many cylinders, to maintain good streaming speed.

By: mark

mark — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 04:10:18 +0000

Hi, we looked at one of these and am looking forward to purchasing one.

A few points of note
1. At present rebooting the device clears out the SSD and needs to be re-warmed up. Apparenmtly this will be resolved in a future update

2. A good reference for performance is Brendan’s blog, basically it is highly recommended if you don’t need the storage to use RAID1. http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/

3. The SSDs only store randomly accessed blocks, streaming data is excluded from the L2ARC

4. Don’t forget to check the Fishworks Wiki to see if there are any relevant updates http://wikis.sun.com/display/FishWorks/Fishworks;jsessionid=1EAA02A67A44460598F11F22D0788B64

5. Another good performance point is to use an 8kByte block size as this means your data is more likely to sit in the L2ARC (also probably easier in future updaets for De-Duplication to find duplicate blocks.

Cheers

Mark

By: Serdar Kaya

Serdar Kaya — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 05:51:39 +0000

Hello, now we are testing a 7410 with 3 read & 2 write ssds and 22tb sata. The problem is that, we could not warm-up ssds yet, so performance is worse than we expect to. How about your system? I think it must be better now.

By: jjstautt

jjstautt — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 00:23:52 +0000

Unfortunately, I don’t. The version of Ubuntu we use at work wasn’t quite there yet on the NFSv4 front so we are stuck using NFSv3. One of the things I’ve noticed is:
1) getting the idmap rules specified correctly is essential
2) if we are modifying the permissions from linux, it is best to “su – username” to change permissions on files owned by username. If we don’t it seems to mess up username’s access from CIFS.
3) make sure you have non-blocking mandatory locking is on if you are using both CIFS and NFS on the share

By: tony parsonage

tony parsonage — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 04:13:57 +0000

Hi,

I don’t suppose you have any step by step guides on setting up a CIFS/NFS share using NFSv4 by any chance. We are having major issues and I believe it to be an ACL issue why we can create files in windows but get “I/O Error” when trying to list the files in OpenSolaris.

Any ideas greatly appreciated.

Tony