7110 Compression

[john]

Hi, just thought I would put a post up about the Compression on the 7110 as I am just playing in the simulator dragging students home drives (copies of obviously) onto it to see how it compresses a selection of randomness as it were and WOW I am impressed. I grabbed 17 student home areas, curent size around about 750MB, compressed down to 430MB so thats a good compression. I will be honest and say that I have got the top level of compression on with that, so the CPU is taking a hit (got big rain drops on the front for it at present copying over some sample media studies folders full of premier files etc) so I know its stressing it, so maybe top level isn't the best for day to day running but you can switch it all on the fly which is a great feature (top level may be good on day 2 day running when not moving over large GBs of files perhaps?)

Anyway, with that compression on a random selection of home areas this could be a good space saving tool as well as flexible and powerfull storage

[kmount]

John,

Are you using the simulator? How much memory have you allocated for it bearing in mind what is available in the real thing and what processor do you have in the box running the sim?

[john]

Yup I am mate, Simulator setup on my XP Pro Workstation, spec of it is AMD Athlon 64 X2, with 4GB Ram. Seperate HDD that the VM Runs from. Ram allocated lol whatever the VMWare has taken from my PC, looks like 1GB to me from what I can see on the setup and what the Sun webinterface is showing but i may be wrong

By no means am I complaining and I know that on the real shiny thing it will be better as it will have some fair grunt behind it but thought i'd just put my findings and I did say it was on the sim in the first post so hopefulyl people will see that and not cry thinking there real 7110 may be a bit funny or owt

Next step iSCSI test to my workstation if you care to give me a pointer

[kmount]

Oh aye defo it's good to get some stats out; just wanted to clarify whether the high compression level was a show stopper. The 1GB won't be helping!

What would you like to know?

[john]

Im gonna try moving over 50 year 11s (again copies obv) to the Sim later on as they have been here 3 years so have 3 years of accumulated junk etc to see the compression on that, again it will be on high as I do want to really see what the potential could be

As for iSCSI, its turned on under config, for testing all the properties are empty can I get away with that purely for my testing, then under initiators ive made one, no chap or secret on it either.

Share - made a share, under the project settings for iSCSI are green and export target is turned on, ACL is set for my initiator i made in the previous section.

Eeer thats all I have done. My XP PC has the MS iSCSI initator on it, ive set the target portal to the IP of the box and thats about it. I'm probably being blonde I am sure of it but you know, its friday

[Ric_]

@john: It might also be worth using IOMeter to test the performance with and without compression so that you have a comparison.

[john]

@john: It might also be worth using IOMeter to test the performance with and without compression so that you have a comparison.

Could do but that would take more effort on my part, I'm very much convinced that the product is for me and the College. I've taken over half the Y11 home areas, its chopped over 1GB off them! They were around 5Gb on the existing server and show as just under 4GB! Talk about saving space Very much worth it