Comments on: Review: Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System – Part IV

By: Burana

Burana — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 21:58:17 +0000

Thanks, for this review.

I can confirm everything you said in this review. The S7000 systems (and especially the S7140 systems we own) are remarkably good products.

We had to replace our aging NetApp Filers and did a Try&Buy on these new systems, to see if they hold the promises. Our opinion is: It is one of the best products Sun has ever build.

We have migrated almost all of the data from the old NetApp system, and the performance is great. If we also look at the investment and running costs, there is nothing out there that comes close…

The great NFS performance which is achieved with Sun’s own FAST (Hybrid Storage Pool), will certainly help us moving away from the cumbersome EMC DMX-3 systems we still run and no-one really likes.

Now that we can run our most demanding workload on low-cost boxes, it would be anyway difficult to argument with my management, why we should replace the already too expensive DMX-3 systems with V-MAX, and not on a proven alternative

By: Chris Evans

Chris Evans — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 20:39:30 +0000

Craig, nice. I may open a training school just for this product as I could run it all from ESXi!

Chris

By: CraigM

CraigM — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 20:37:51 +0000

Yes, you are upgrading the same codebase … the only obvious issues are that the physical appliance has a significant amount of CPU horsepower to bring the bear which generally most VMs can’t muster. Hence you may run into some issues which are basically due to resource issues, memory, CPU, etc. I tend to run the VM with the standard 1Gb memory for instance, ideal for day-to-day duty on my laptop with another VM running for AD, client, etc, but before an upgrade I’d typically allocate an extra 1Gb or RAM and maybe another core temporarily and then drop them back after a successful upgrade.

The codebase is consistent (and a single image) for all released products and the “virtual appliance” … there is only one image available from Sun, covering VM, 7110, 7210, 7310 (7310C), 7410 (7410C)

HTH

Craig

By: Chris Evans

Chris Evans — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 20:10:08 +0000

Craig

So you’re saying I could use the simulator (or virtual appliance) to validate my code upgrades?

Chris

By: CraigM

CraigM — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 19:22:36 +0000

PS. Forgot to say that its also viable to take the VM based S7000 simulator and apply the released software updates (new releases available from sun.com) to it, to follow the curve of S7000 developments, its behaviour will mimic that of the hardware S7000 (within the bounds/caveats outlined, ie. performance, etc), try that with a normal “simulator”!

Just take into account the virtualised image might need some increased VM resources (CPU/memory) on a desktop/laptop to run thru complete systems upgrades.

By: CraigM

CraigM — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 19:13:46 +0000

Actually, “virtual appliance” is probably more accurate than “simulator” … the reason it seems to most accurately mirror the operation of the S7000 physical appliances is that it is the complete software load of one of those devices, but the underlying hardware that it discovers to operate on (and the hardware it enumerates for fault diagnosis) is a simulated architecture description.

The only feature of the appliance which cannot be effectively explored in this image is the clustering capability, that is present, but only automatically enabled by detection of the dedicated cluster card … which has not been described in the VM image.

Otherwise, this is functionally 100% a S7000, it is even viable to develop, test, certify workflows and scripts against the system and even replicate to/from real S7000 appliances (for test purposes!).

Carry a S7000 on your laptop wherever you go … we do!

CraigM