Re: [zfs-discuss] External drive enclosures + Sun Server for mass storage
Frank Cusack wrote: thumper (x4500) seems pretty reasonable ($/GB). -frank I am always amazed that people consider thumper to be reasonable in price. 450% or more markup per drive from street price in July 2006 numbers doesn't seem reasonable to me, even after subtracting the cost of the system. I like the x4500, I wish I had one. But, I can't pay what Sun wants for it. So, instead, I am stuck buying lower end Sun systems and buying third party SCSI/SATA JBODs. I like Sun. I like their products, but I can't understand their storage pricing most of the time. -Shannon ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] External drive enclosures + Sun Server for mass storage
On January 20, 2007 2:16:45 AM -0600 Shannon Roddy [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Frank Cusack wrote: thumper (x4500) seems pretty reasonable ($/GB). -frank I am always amazed that people consider thumper to be reasonable in price. 450% or more markup per drive from street price in July 2006 numbers doesn't seem reasonable to me, even after subtracting the cost of the system. I like the x4500, I wish I had one. But, I can't pay what Sun wants for it. So, instead, I am stuck buying lower end Sun systems and buying third party SCSI/SATA JBODs. But what data throughput do you get? Thumper is phenomenal. It is ashame (for the consumer) that it's not available without drives. Sun has always had an obscene markup on drives. -frank ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
[zfs-discuss] Re: How much do we really want zpool remove?
we migrate in our solaris8+vxvm+SAN environment 500tb to new storage arrays. we have seen a lot of migration ways, falconstore etc., but the only acceptable way is the host based mirror with vxvm. so we can migrate manuelly in a few weeks but without downtime. tell me how we can do this with zpools without the ability to remove luns from the pool. This is our view and when you only have thumbers this is not important. This message posted from opensolaris.org ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
[zfs-discuss] Re: External drive enclosures + Sun Server for massstorage
To me, hard drives today are as much a commodity item as network cable, GBICs, NICs, DVD drives, etc. They are and they aren't. Reliability, particularly in high-heat vibration environments, can vary quite a bit. For sun to charge 4-8 times street price for hard drives that they order just the same as I do from the same manufacturers that I order from is infuriating. I won't argue with that, I remember when all the vendors were doing that. Maybe they still are, at least the ones who still sell drives. :-) But in the particular case of a Thumper, I think Sun is doing the right thing by selling only qualified drives. That is a very dense case. Not every drive with the right form factor will work reliably in it. Even drives which work in another dense case may not work reliably because the heat vibration profile is different. That's a separate issue from the price charged for the drives; but I'd be very hesitant to sell and support a system without drives if I knew that only certain drives would work without cooking or excessive seek errors. This message posted from opensolaris.org ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] External drive enclosures + Sun Server for mass storage
Shannon Roddy wrote: For sun to charge 4-8 times street price for hard drives that they order just the same as I do from the same manufacturers that I order from is infuriating. Are you sure they're really the same drives? Mechanically, they probably are, but last I knew (I don't work in the Storage part of Sun, so I have no particular knowledge about current practices), Sun and other systems vendors (I know both Apple and DEC did) had custom firmware in the drives they resell. One reason for this is that the systems vendors qualified the drives with a particular firmware load, and did not buy just the latest firmware that the drive manufacturer wanted to ship, for quality-control reasons. At least some of the time, there were custom functionality changes as well. -- --Ed ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] External drive enclosures + Sun Server for mass storage
Hi Shannon, The markup is still pretty high on a per-drive basis. That being said, $1-2/GB is darn low for the capacity in a server. Plus, you're also paying for having enough HyperTransport I/O to feed the PCI-E I/O. Does anyone know what problems they had with the 250GB version of the Thumper that caused them to pull it? Best Regards, Jason On 1/20/07, Shannon Roddy [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Frank Cusack wrote: thumper (x4500) seems pretty reasonable ($/GB). -frank I am always amazed that people consider thumper to be reasonable in price. 450% or more markup per drive from street price in July 2006 numbers doesn't seem reasonable to me, even after subtracting the cost of the system. I like the x4500, I wish I had one. But, I can't pay what Sun wants for it. So, instead, I am stuck buying lower end Sun systems and buying third party SCSI/SATA JBODs. I like Sun. I like their products, but I can't understand their storage pricing most of the time. -Shannon ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
[zfs-discuss] Re: External drive enclosures + Sun Server for massstorage
Hi David, I don't know if your company qualifies as a startup under Sun's regs but you can get an X4500/Thumper for $24,000 under this program: http://www.sun.com/emrkt/startupessentials/ Best Regards, Jason I'm already a part of the Startup Essentials program. Perhaps I should have been more clear, my apologies, I am not looking for 48 drives worth of storage. This is beyond our means to purchase at this point, regardless of the $/GB. I do agree, it is quite a good deal. I was talking about the huge gap in storage solutions from Sun for the middle-ground. While $24,000 is a wonderful deal, it's absolute overkill for what I'm thinking about doing. I was looking for more around 6-8 drives. David This message posted from opensolaris.org ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] Re: External drive enclosures + Sun Server for massstorage
[EMAIL PROTECTED] said: I was talking about the huge gap in storage solutions from Sun for the middle-ground. While $24,000 is a wonderful deal, it's absolute overkill for what I'm thinking about doing. I was looking for more around 6-8 drives. How about a Sun V40z? It's available with up to 6 drives (300GB ea), and a low-end configuration (cpu/ram-wise) might not be out of your price range, depending on your discount. There are plenty of slots if you want to later add external enclosures, too. Of course, Dell probably has cheaper 64-bit systems with 6 internal drives available too. Regards, Marion ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] External drive enclosures + Sun Server for mass storage
Frank Cusack wrote: On January 19, 2007 6:47:30 PM -0800 Erik Trimble [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Not to be picky, but the X2100 and X2200 series are NOT designed/targeted for disk serving (they don't even have redundant power supplies). They're compute-boxes. The X4100/X4200 are what you are looking for to get a flexible box more oriented towards disk i/o and expansion. But x4100/x4200 only accept expensive 2.5 SAS drives, which have small capacities. That doesn't seem oriented towards disk serving. -frank Those are boot drives, and for those with small amounts of data (and, you get 73gb and soon 143gb drives in that form factor, which isn't really any different than typical 3.5 SCSI drive sizes). No, I was talking about the internal architecture. The X4100/X4200 have multiple independent I/O buses, with lots of PCI-E and PCI-X slots. So if you were looking to hook up external storage (which was the original poster's intent), the X4100/X4200 is a much better match. -Erik -- Erik Trimble Java System Support Mailstop: usca22-123 Phone: x17195 Santa Clara, CA Timezone: US/Pacific (GMT-0800) ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] External drive enclosures + Sun Server for mass storage
Rich Teer wrote: On Fri, 19 Jan 2007, Frank Cusack wrote: But x4100/x4200 only accept expensive 2.5 SAS drives, which have small capacities. [...] ... and only 2 or 4 drives each. Hence my blog entry a while back, wishing for a Sun-badged 1U SAS JBOD with room for 8 drives. I'm amazed that Sun hasn't got a product to fill this obvious (to me at least) hole in their storage catalogue. The Sun 3120 does 4 x 3.5 SCSI drives in a 1U, and the Sun 3320 does 12 x 3.5 in 2U. Both come in JBOD configs (and the 3320 has HW Raid if you want it). Yes, I'm certain that having 8-10 SAS drives in a 1U might be useful; HP thinks so: the MSA50 (http://h18004.www1.hp.com/storage/disk_storage/msa_diskarrays/drive_enclosures/ma50/index.html) But, given that Sun doesn't seem to be really targeting Small Business right now (at least, it appears that way), the 3120 works quite well, feature-wise, for Medium Business/Enterprise areas.. I priced out the HP MSA-series vs the Sun StorageTek 3000-series, and the HP stuff is definitely cheaper. By a noticable amount. So I'd say Sun has less of a hardware selection gap, than a pricing gap. The current low end of the Sun line just isn't cheap enough. Of course the opinions expressed herein are my own, and I have no special knowledge of anything relevant to this discussion. (TM) :-) -- Erik Trimble Java System Support Mailstop: usca22-123 Phone: x17195 Santa Clara, CA Timezone: US/Pacific (GMT-0800) ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] External drive enclosures + Sun Server for mass storage
On Sat, 20 Jan 2007, Erik Trimble wrote: The Sun 3120 does 4 x 3.5 SCSI drives in a 1U, and the Sun 3320 does 12 x 3.5 in 2U. Both come in JBOD configs (and the 3320 has HW Raid if you want it). Yep; I know about those products. But the entry level 3120 (with 2 x 73GB disks) has a list price of $5K! I'm a Sun supporter, but those kind of prices are akin to daylight robbery! Or, to put it another way, the list price of that simple JBOD is more than twice as expensive as the X4100--a server it woulr probably be connected to! But more to the point, SAS seems to be future, so it would be really nice to have a Sun SAS JBOD array. As I said in my blog about this, if Sun could produce an 8-drive SAS 1U JBOD array, with a starting price (say, 2 x 36GB drives with 2 hot swapable PSUs) of $2K, they'd sell 'em by the truck load. I mean let's be honest: when we're talking about low end JBOD arrays, we're talking about one or two PSUs, some mechanism for holding the drives, a bit of electronics, and a metal case to put it all in. No expensive rocket science necessary. Yes, I'm certain that having 8-10 SAS drives in a 1U might be useful; HP thinks so: the MSA50 (http://h18004.www1.hp.com/storage/disk_storage/msa_diskarrays/drive_enclosures/ma50/index.html) Yep, that's what I'm thinking of, only in a nice case that is similar to the X4100 (for economies of scale and pretty data centers). But, given that Sun doesn't seem to be really targeting Small Business right now (at least, it appears that way), the 3120 works quite well, feature-wise, for Medium Business/Enterprise areas.. But that's the point: Sun IS targeting Small Business: that's what the Sun Startup Essentials program is all about! Not to mention the programs aimed at developers. Agreed, Sun isn't targeting the mum and dad kind of business, but there are a huge number of businesses that need more storage than will fit into an X4200/T2000 but less than what's available with (say) the 3320. of a hardware selection gap, than a pricing gap. The current low end of the Sun line just isn't cheap enough. Couldn't agree more. -- Rich Teer, SCSA, SCNA, SCSECA, OpenSolaris CAB member President, Rite Online Inc. Voice: +1 (250) 979-1638 URL: http://www.rite-group.com/rich ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] Re: External drive enclosures + Sun Server for massstorage
Frank Cusack wrote: On January 20, 2007 1:07:27 PM -0800 David J. Orman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On that note, I've recently read it might be the case that the 1u sun servers do not have hot-swappable disk drives... is this really true? Yes. Only for the x2100 (and x2100m2). It's not that the hardware isn't hot-swappable, it's that Solaris doesn't support it. If you run Windows you will get hot swap. No. To be clear, Sun defines hot swap as a device which can be inserted or removed without system administration tasks required. Sun defines hot plug as a device which can be inserted or removed without causing damage or interruption to a running system, but which may require system administration. The vast majority of the disks Sun sells are hot pluggable. That said, this definition is not always used consistently, as is the case with the x2100. I filed a bug against the docs in this case, and unfortunately it was closed as will not fix. :-( -- richard ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] External drive enclosures + Sun Server for mass storage
Frank Cusack wrote: On January 19, 2007 5:59:13 PM -0800 David J. Orman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: card that supports SAS would be *ideal*, Except that SAS support on Solaris is not very good. One major problem is they treat it like scsi when instead they should treat it like FC (or native SATA). uhmm... SAS is serial attached SCSI, why wouldn't we treat it like SCSI? BTW, the sd driver and ssd (SCSI over fibre channel) drivers have the same source. SATA will also use the sd driver, as Pawel describes in his blogs on the SATA framework at http://blogs.sun.com/pawelblog What I gather from this is that today, SATA drives will either look like IDE drives or SCSI drives, to some extent. When they look like IDE drives, you don't get all of the cfgadm or luxadm management options and you have to do thinks like hot plug in a more-rather-than-less manual mode. When they look like SCSI drives, then you'll also get the more-automatic hot plug features. -- richard ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] Re: External drive enclosures + Sun Server for massstorage
On Sat, 20 Jan 2007, Richard Elling wrote: To be clear, Sun defines hot swap as a device which can be inserted or removed without system administration tasks required. Sun defines hot plug as a device which can be inserted or removed without causing damage or interruption to a running system, but which may require system administration. The vast majority of the disks Sun sells are hot pluggable. OK; given the above definitions, could you please confirm one way or another that the disks in the X2100 are hot pluggable? In other words, if I have a pair of mirrored drives in an X2100 and one of those drives dies, can I take out and replace the defective drive without down time? -- Rich Teer, SCSA, SCNA, SCSECA, OpenSolaris CAB member President, Rite Online Inc. Voice: +1 (250) 979-1638 URL: http://www.rite-group.com/rich ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] Re: External drive enclosures + Sun Server for massstorage
On 20-Jan-07, at 8:48 PM, Erik Trimble wrote: Frank Cusack wrote: On January 20, 2007 1:07:27 PM -0800 David J. Orman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On that note, I've recently read it might be the case that the 1u sun servers do not have hot-swappable disk drives... is this really true? Only for the x2100 (and x2100m2). It's not that the hardware isn't hot-swappable, it's that Solaris doesn't support it. If you run Windows you will get hot swap. -frank ___ I believe this also applies to the X2200 M2 as well. Essentially, all the low-end x64 servers using SATA have Nvidia chipsets which theoretically support Hot-swap of SATA; as noted, the Windows drivers do support this feature, while the Solaris 10 drivers don't (and, I don't know if there are plans to add this feature or not). Personally, I've always been a bit nervous of using chipset-based RAID and expecting Hot-swap to actually, particularly with SATA. I've been bitten on various different (non-Sun) hardware trying this, and it has made me gun-shy of thinking I can actually pull a SATA drive while its mirror is still mounted... Some of us don't give a damn about chipset RAID and want hotswap/ hotplug drives with SVM and/or ZFS. Richard Elling wrote: To be clear, Sun defines hot swap as a device which can be inserted or removed without system administration tasks required. Sun defines hot plug as a device which can be inserted or removed without causing damage or interruption to a running system, but which may require system administration. The vast majority of the disks Sun sells are hot pluggable. To be clear: the X2100 drives are neither hotswap nor hotplug under Solaris. Replacing a failed drive requires a reboot. --Toby -- Erik Trimble Java System Support Mailstop: usca22-123 Phone: x17195 Santa Clara, CA Timezone: US/Pacific (GMT-0800) ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] Re: External drive enclosures + Sun Server for massstorage
On 21-Jan-07, at 12:12 AM, Rich Teer wrote: On Sat, 20 Jan 2007, Richard Elling wrote: To be clear, Sun defines hot swap as a device which can be inserted or removed without system administration tasks required. Sun defines hot plug as a device which can be inserted or removed without causing damage or interruption to a running system, but which may require system administration. The vast majority of the disks Sun sells are hot pluggable. OK; given the above definitions, could you please confirm one way or another that the disks in the X2100 are hot pluggable? In other words, if I have a pair of mirrored drives in an X2100 and one of those drives dies, can I take out and replace the defective drive without down time? NO - unless you're running Windows AND chipset RAID (or whatever you want to call it). This is easily verified by experiment with Solaris 10. More information via links I posted earlier in this thread, or buried in X2100 documentation. --Toby -- Rich Teer, SCSA, SCNA, SCSECA, OpenSolaris CAB member President, Rite Online Inc. Voice: +1 (250) 979-1638 URL: http://www.rite-group.com/rich ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
