jjstautt

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.

This announcement is awesome, however I will probably not get to play around with it at all. We currently under-use VMWare at work so there aren’t any virtualization projects in the near future. However, it’s really nice to have the ability to XenMotion for free.

I don’t really have time to find external links, so I leave this as an exercise to the reader.

Didn’t we already give Bell a whack of money to implement broadband to all Canadians? We need to enforce that they provide broadband internet to rural areas, NOT give Bell more money intended for rural broadband which will just be wasted away again. IIRC, the CRTC is subsidising Bell’s infrastructure costs and requiring them to provide the GAS (Gateway Access Service) to their ADSL competition. Bell still refuses to provide access to many areas until the residents can prove there is enough guarantee of profit for it to be worthwhile for Bell. Why are they being allowed to use subsidised funds in this way Mr Harper?

Canada has already given satellite providers money to launch satellites intended to provide internet access to the territories up North. IIRC, original programs in this initiative were abused to sell internet and TV access to other countries as it was more profitable.