> From: Richard Elling [mailto:richard.ell...@nexenta.com] > > > I'll agree to call Nexenta "a major commerical interest," in regards to > contribution to the open source ZFS tree, if they become an officially > supported OS on Dell, HP, and/or IBM hardware. > > NexentaStor is officially supported on Dell, HP, and IBM hardware. The only > question is, "what is your definition of 'support'"? Many NexentaStor
I don't want to argue about this, but I'll just try to clarify what I meant: Presently, I have a dell server with officially supported solaris, and it's as unreliable as pure junk. It's just the backup server, so I'm free to frequently create & destroy it... And as such, I frequently do recreate and destroy it. It is entirely stable running RHEL (centos) because Dell and RedHat have a partnership with a serious number of human beings and machines looking for and fixing any compatibility issues. For my solaris instability, I blame the fact that solaris developers don't do significant quality assurance on non-sun hardware. To become "officially" compatible, the whole qualification process is like this: Somebody installs it, doesn't see any problems, and then calls it "certified." They reformat with something else, and move on. They don't build their business on that platform, so they don't detect stability issues like the ones reported... System crashes once per week and so forth. Solaris therefore passes the test, and becomes one of the options available on the drop-down menu for OSes with a new server. (Of course that's been discontinued by oracle, but that's how it was in the past.) Developers need to "eat their own food." Smoke your own crack. Hardware engineers at Dell need to actually use your OS on their hardware, for their development efforts. I would be willing to bet Sun hardware engineers use a significant percentage of solaris servers for their work... And guess what solaris engineers don't use? Non-sun hardware. Pretty safe bet you won't find any Dell servers in the server room where solaris developers do their thing. If you want to be taken seriously as an alternative storage option, you've got to at LEAST be listed as a factory-distributed OS that is an option to ship with the new server, and THEN, when people such as myself buy those things, we've got to have a good enough experience that we don't all bitch and flame about it afterward. Nexenta, you need a real and serious partnership with Dell, HP, IBM. Get their developers to run YOUR OS on the servers which they use for development. Get them to sell your product bundled with their product. And dedicate real and serious engineering into bugfixes working with customers, to truly identify root causes of instability, with a real OS development and engineering and support group. It's got to be STABLE, that's the #1 requirement. I previously made the comparison... Even close-source solaris & ZFS is a better alternative to close-source netapp & wafl. So for now, those are the only two enterprise supportable options I'm willing to stake my career on, and I'll buy Sun hardware with Solaris. But I really wish I could feel confident buying a cheaper Dell server and running ZFS on it. Nexenta, if you make yourself look like a serious competitor against solaris, and really truly form an awesome stable partnership with Dell, I will happily buy your stuff instead of Oracle. Even if you are a little behind in feature offering. But I will not buy your stuff if I can't feel perfectly confident in its stability. Ever heard the phrase "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." You're the little guys. If you want to compete against the big guys, you've got to kick ass. And don't get sued into oblivion. Even today's feature set is perfectly adequate for at least a couple of years to come. If you put all your effort into stability and bugfixes, serious partnerships with Dell, HP, IBM, and become extremely professional looking and stable, with fanatical support... You don't have to worry about new feature development for some while. Stability is #1 and not disappearing is a pretty huge threat right now. Based on my experience, I would not recommend buying Dell with Solaris, even if that were still an option. If you want solaris, buy sun/oracle hardware, because then you can actually expect it to work reliably. And if solaris isn't stable on dell ... then all the solaris derivatives including nexenta can't be trusted either, no matter how much you claim it's "supported." Show me the HCL, and show me the partnership between your software engineers and Dell's hardware engineers. Make me believe there is a serious and thorough qualification process. Do a huge volume. Your volume must be large enough to justify dedicating some engineers to serious bugfix efforts in the field. Otherwise... When I need to buy something stable... I'm going to buy solaris on sun hardware, because I know that's thoroughly tried, tested, and stable. _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
