I think it's a cracking upgrade Richard. I was hoping Sun would do something like this, so it's great to see it arrive.
As others have said though, I think Sun are missing a trick by not working with Vmetro or Fusion-io to add nvram cards to the range now. In particular, if Sun were to work with Fusion-io and add Solaris drivers for the ioDrive, you'd be in a position right now to offer a 48TB server with 64GB of read cache, and 80GB of write cache You could even offer the same card on the smaller x4240. Can you imagine how well those machines would work as NFS servers? Either one would make a superb NFS storage platform for VMware: You've got incredible performance, ZFS snapshots for backups, and ZFS send/receive to replicate the data elsewhere. NetApp and EMC charge a small fortune for a NAS that can do all that, and they don't offer anywhere near that amount of fast cache. Both servers would take Infiniband too, which is dirt cheap these days at $125 a card, is supported by VMware, and particularly on the smaller server, is way faster than anything EMC or NetApp offer. As a NFS storage platform, you'd be beating EMC and NetApp on price, spindle count, features and performance. I really hope somebody at Sun considers this, and thinks about expanding the "What can you do with an x4540" section on the website to include VMware. Ross This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
