The cool
I’ve been trawling through all of the online marketing material concerning the new Sun™ Storage 7000 Series Family and overall I’m liking what I see from a general architecture standpoint. They appear to have found a simple, effective means towards mixing different tiers of storage (price/performance/capacity) that spans SSHD, SAS 10K and SATA 7K. You put create pools of SSHD devices for Logging (Write) and Pre-fetch (Read) operations in front of your primary physical disk storage. This is simplistic when compared with a true multi-tier solution like Compellent, but has the advantage of being a simpler, pragmatic solution to managing the gap between IOps and available surface.
Functionally you are adding a very large tier of cache between the very volatile DRAM cache and the much slower disks. A practical two tier storage system based on the ZFS components. In fact, there’s nothing really new here at all (see: Logging and Cache devices), except that with the advent of ‘affordable’ high performance SSHD devices, we can now imagine pulling more than acceptable performance out of a 100% SATA based array.
The upshot is that by spreading your CapEx investment out between low-cost, high volume SATA drives and a few expensive high-speed SSHD, you can probably come out a lot cheaper than the required number of 15K FC disks to supply the same number of IOps. This has a direct impact on the hard OpEx figures like power cost since you’re running SSHD (low power devices) and fewer, slower disks that also consume less (especially with the latest generation of ‘green’ drives). This contrasted with the high number of power hungry 15K disks that needed to be able to supply an equivalent volume of IOps.
The software
Where the solution really shines is in the management software. Go download the VMware simulator and take it for a spin. A really well done storage management interface that handles everything in a clear and understandable manner. (Hint to Sun: not everyone uses a QWERTY keyboard).
Live, real time instrumentation of everything that’s happening in the system: want to see a breakdown of NFS traffic by latency? No problem. Want to correlate CPU use with CIFS traffic? Done. Is my write traffic saturating my available cache devices? Right here.
This is one of the biggest value adds here since virtualization and consolidation projects often run into issues with the shared storage and being able to easily look inside the storage environment and identify bottlenecks and performance issues is an absolute godsend.
One of the major attractions of the architecture is that it’s based on standard AMD servers with a standard Solaris OS behind the scenes, so you can add whatever supported communications cards you want, up to 10GE for going head to head with some Fibre Channel solutions.
The not so great
The solutions are unfortunately (from what I can gather) restricted to very specific hardware combinations. The management toolkits are directly related to implementations based on each physical “appliance” and a specific set of expansion options. From what I can gather, you can’t buy the entry level server, add your own HBA and hook up a JBOD to extend the available capacity1.
The related software cost of a solution goes up with the size of the storage bay purchased. A quick comparison of the equivalent J4540 server which is exactly the same thing, but in a DIY version where you can use ZFS to create the exact same performance profile, but you don’t get the management console.
Now the following price equivalents are not exact since the appliance version replaced a few of the SATA disks with SSHD drives, but it gives you an idea of what the software will cost you over top of the basic hardware implementation:
7210 X4540 Software cost 12Tb $35,000 $22,000 $12,000 24Tb $72,000 $42,000 $30,000 44Tb $118,000 $62,000 $56,000My take
This is an awesome solution that is a direct shot across the bow of Netapp and all of the iSCSI appliances out there and takes aim at a lot of the midrange storage solutions out there. I haven’t done the pricing of equivalent Netapp solutions but in my experience, they’re a whole lot more expensive and don’t offer the kind of easily accessed analytics capabilites. They’ve got a few other arrows in their quiver (Metrocluster), but the bulk of their sales story just got a whole less compelling.
I’m disappointed that it’s not more open with the ability to attach whatever storage you feel appropriate. The appliance version takes over the OS and drops you directly into an appliance shell, so you don’t access to the raw command line to manage your own ZPools manually (at least that’s the behavior in the simulator). I imagine that this could be hacked relatively easily, but would undoubtedly break the support agreement for the appliance.
What’s also missing is the ability to easily expand your current model or move from model to model as your requirements grow. We’re back in forklift upgrade mode if you started with the entry level and need to move to the next model up. The step between models is also pretty extreme - 2Tb to 12Tb makes for a big gap. From a VMware perspective this is less of pain than it used to be since the advent of SVMotion, but it’s still a pain point.
I was hoping that with the entry level model you could add a SAS HBA and add in a couple of J4500 storage bays to permit a more practical growth curve. Also, the clustering option isn’t available until you step up to the top of the line model which in my opinion is a mistake. The availability of storage is just as important for smaller volumes as it is for the bigger ones.
I’d really love to see Sun offer the FishWorks management software as a separate product that you can use to manipulate any available storage. This would permit you to use a standard Sun box as a SAN front end, optimized with local SSHD drives to give an instant performance boost.
But for anyone that’s seriously considering a Netapp solution (without a MetroCluster) or Equalogic or EMC AX or CX these new products offer a really compelling value proposition.
- I could be wrong here, but the simulator UI doesn’t seem to offer any kind of free form pool management options. I tried adding some additional drives but haven’t got them recognized yet.↑