Sun Storage 7110

[pete]

Dedupe is out.

 

ak-2010.02.09.0.0 Release Notes - Fishworks - wikis.sun.com

 

Edit - can't see a download link yet though?

Edited March 2, 2010 by pete

[Duke]

Nice one, wasn't supposed to be out until the 15th and hasn't even hit the RSS feed yet!

[john]

wooo it also has Indestructible Shares! Sounds impressive (or im simple terms you cannot delete them by accident)

[Duke]

We have changed the nomenclature of directory ACL configuration to match the expectations of Windows administrators

 

Sounds interesting.

 

Deduplication

 

The appliance now optionally supports deduplication, allowing duplicate blocks that are logically separate to share underlying storage. Deduplication is enabled on a per-share (or per-project) basis, but the scope for deduplication is the pool. Deduplication represents a tradeoff: it saves space, but also may induce additional I/Os when freeing a block. Read the documentation carefully before deploying this feature.

 

The thing is... I think this only applies to incoming data. What about my current 350GB of resources that would probably de-dupe to about 150GB? Am I only going to see the benefits on any new writes?

 

CIFS access-based enumeration

 

We have added a new share property that permits users to see only those CIFS files to which they have access, allowing users in many-client environments with shallow directory hierarchies to not be overwhelmed with files that they cannot access.

 

Phil was talking about this, sounds really cool to me and is something we'll benefit from. It's really just an extra layer of security-through-obscurity, but I like that!

 

Multiple pool support

 

To better support large, multi-tenancy environments, the appliance now supports multiple pools – though to achieve optimal economies of scale, it is recommended that pools generally be few and large.

 

Remember that your pool determines your RAID type, so those of you with J4400's can now split the array in 12 disks or RAID1 for performance and 12 disks of RAID6 for capacity.

 

Indestructible shares

 

Shares can be optionally configured to prevent them from being accidentally destroyed by an administrator.

 

Uh, good.

 

Chris

[teejay]

FYI, this is how I've got our 7110's and 7310 to connect to 2008 R2 Domain Controllers:

 

Make sure you storage is on a 2010.02 release or later.

 

On the DC's

1. Open Registry Editor. To do this, click Start, type regedit in the Start Search box, and then press ENTER.

2. Locate and then right-click the following registry subkey:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\MSV1_0

3. On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD (32-bit) Value.

4. Type AllowLegacySrvCall, and then press ENTER.

5. Right-click AllowLegacySrvCall, and then click Modify.

6. Type 1 in the Value data box, and then click OK.

7. Exit Registry Editor.

 

Restart your DC

 

In Storage Server web interface:

Services, CIFS

set Preferred Domain Controller to the IP address of you DC

set LAN Manager Compatibility Level to 5

Apply Changes

Restart CIFS service

Restart AD service

Check in AD service and you should now be connected to your DC

Edited June 4, 2010 by teejay

[teejay]

FYI, this is how I've got our 7110's and 7310 to connect to 2008 R2 Domain Controllers:

 

Make sure you storage is on a 2010.02 release or later.

 

On the DC's

1. Open Registry Editor. To do this, click Start, type regedit in the Start Search box, and then press ENTER.

2. Locate and then right-click the following registry subkey:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\MSV1_0

3. On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD (32-bit) Value.

4. Type AllowLegacySrvCall, and then press ENTER.

5. Right-click AllowLegacySrvCall, and then click Modify.

6. Type 1 in the Value data box, and then click OK.

7. Exit Registry Editor.

 

Restart your DC

 

In Storage Server web interface:

Services, CIFS

set Preferred Domain Controller to the IP address of you DC

set LAN Manager Compatibility Level to 5

Apply Changes

Restart CIFS service

Restart AD service

Check in AD service and you should now be connected to your DC

 

Ignore this at the moment, having problem with this, will update when I get it working properly.

[pete]

Has anyone worked out which customer accounts / areas on Sun have synched across to Oracle properly yet? I'm getting ok logins in some areas and "sorry, don't know who you are" in others.

[Duke]

Has anyone worked out which customer accounts / areas on Sun have synched across to Oracle properly yet? I'm getting ok logins in some areas and "sorry, don't know who you are" in others.

 

Just logged into my inventory account with no problem and didn't have any issues the last time I tried to download a patch - sorry! Give Sun/Oracle a buzz and they should be able to help...

[StoreThomas]

Ignore this at the moment, having problem with this, will update when I get it working properly.

 

Any luck in setting the preferred DC?

 

Thanks

Thomas

[teejay]

Yes, it does work as above, it just needs to be left alone for a little bit afterwards.

 

Just a word of caution if you're doing upgrades to your DC's, DNS etc, make sure the Sun box is connected to and happy talking to one of your new DC's and DNS servers before you demote the old DC's

[StoreThomas]

Thanks for the reply, and yes, that's exactly what worries me so thanks for posting

[sjl]

Has anyone managed to get per user quotas working on their 7110 / 7000 series Unified storage systems? I have just bought another 7110 and am trying to get that setup for the users home folders with quotas enabled.

 

I can see how to do quotas manually by typing the windows username in and specifying a quota value – and that works - but I can’t see a default quota value anywhere or a way of applying a quota to a large number of users.

 

It’s going to be an extremely cumbersome interface if you have to add a quota in for all 1500 users for each filesystem individually.

 

I don’t know if im missing something I tested quotas on a group but as I suspected these are cumulative quotas for each member of the group so 250MB on the students AD group would mean all 1200 students share a 250MB quota limit – obviously not going to work!

 

I didn’t really want to present the storage through a Virtual server so I’m leaving that as a last resort. Has anyone got round this by any means? I haven’t looked for scripts to do the task as you’re not supposed to drop into the full console.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Duke]

(stuff about quotas)

 

This is still one of my biggest complaints about the S7000, and I have asked and asked them to implement quotas in this style but have never got anywhere.

 

Don't get me wrong, it's still good hardware, but it can't replace a Windows CIFS server for me until I can apply quotas to a large number of folders. For the record - I want Windows Server FSRM (File Server Resource Manager) style quotas that let me apply a quota to a share, and that quota size is applied to all the top-level folders in that share, not to the share itself.

 

E.g. Folder Structure

 

Share: userspaces$

Folders: johnsmith davejones katerobinson

Folders and Files: My Documents picture.bmp (obviously lots of files in each user's folder)

 

I apply a 400MB quota to the share userspaces$, and this means that the folders johnsmith, davejones, katerobinson (etc.) cannot contain more than 400MB of files each, regardless of the user involved in placing files in there.

 

This is the FSRM way, and it's perfect for what I need, and I just wish the S7000 had it.

 

Chris

[cookie_monster]

This is still one of my biggest complaints about the S7000, and I have asked and asked them to implement quotas in this style but have never got anywhere.

 

Don't get me wrong, it's still good hardware, but it can't replace a Windows CIFS server for me until I can apply quotas to a large number of folders. For the record - I want Windows Server FSRM (File Server Resource Manager) style quotas that let me apply a quota to a share, and that quota size is applied to all the top-level folders in that share, not to the share itself.

 

E.g. Folder Structure

 

Share: userspaces$

Folders: johnsmith davejones katerobinson

Folders and Files: My Documents picture.bmp (obviously lots of files in each user's folder)

 

I apply a 400MB quota to the share userspaces$, and this means that the folders johnsmith, davejones, katerobinson (etc.) cannot contain more than 400MB of files each, regardless of the user involved in placing files in there.

 

This is the FSRM way, and it's perfect for what I need, and I just wish the S7000 had it.

 

Chris

 

 

That's exactly why I have iSCSI volumes mountes to a VHD from my Windows servers so I can use FSRM, it's got too many essential features to miss. I know performance takes a hit but it's not that noticable and we can still use real quotas and file screening.

[Duke]

That's exactly why I have iSCSI volumes mountes to a VHD from my Windows servers so I can use FSRM, it's got too many essential features to miss. I know performance takes a hit but it's not that noticable and we can still use real quotas and file screening.

 

Yep, there's definitely a few people doing that. It's frustrating to have to run through another bottleneck, another point of failure, another thing to manage, when in theory the S7000 could/should handle it all itself. The reporting, ability to do hard or soft quotas, email alerts, etc. in FSRM are all very nice, but I could live without them if the S7000 would just give me a fixed hard quota.

 

There's a Fishworks feedback address, and in the past I've had success with using it to submit bugs (although not necessarily feature requests). Is there any interest in getting together and sending an email to them to request this? If a couple of you are interested, PM your email address (and a name if you wish) and I'll put together an email to the Fishworks team and CC you.

 

Cheers,

Chris

[teejay]

Not having to use quotas was one of our main reasons for moving to the 7000's as it was causing far too many problems. Our students do a lot of audio/video work across the curriculum, plus use some pretty serious software in technology now and quotas were just getting in the way. Has more storage been used, well yes, because they needed to. We do get the odd student do something stupid like copying their whole mp3 collection into the user area, but random checks and using the school behavioural policy to deal with this has worked very well.

So the question is, do you really need to enforce hard quotas?

[cookie_monster]

Not having to use quotas was one of our main reasons for moving to the 7000's as it was causing far too many problems. Our students do a lot of audio/video work across the curriculum, plus use some pretty serious software in technology now and quotas were just getting in the way. Has more storage been used, well yes, because they needed to. We do get the odd student do something stupid like copying their whole mp3 collection into the user area, but random checks and using the school behavioural policy to deal with this has worked very well.

So the question is, do you really need to enforce hard quotas?

 

 

I forgot to put quotas on our year 7's one year and by the time I realised most of them had more 'stuff' in their area than the 6th form, I've found the more you give them the more they use so I prefer to give them a fixed amount and then give them more on request.

[Duke]

Yeah, by the time students have been here for 7 years they're going to accumulate a lot of files, many of which are large and they really don't need. With the S7000 I've got a lot more space, but it's still a finite amount! I see Year 7 video projects where the teachers give kids cameras and get them to film something. The finished compressed video is about 10-20MB, no problem. The uncompressed raw footage is about 300MB. I'll let you guess as to whether they bother a) compressing the footage, or b) deleting the raw stuff once they're done with it.

 

I have no problem with the idea that students are now using multimedia a lot more, need to have bigger files, etc. However, I'd rather set a higher quota that they should never exceed than give them no quota at all. We've got 1600 kids (plus staff who are even worse), all it takes is a few bored/disgruntled students to come in and dump their entire MP3 and DVD collection on the network and all of a sudden my huge storage doesn't seem so big. I'm all for giving kids more space and flexibility to work, but I still want some oversight on it that I don't have to manage manually.

 

Chris

[sjl]

Yep, there's definitely a few people doing that. It's frustrating to have to run through another bottleneck, another point of failure, another thing to manage, when in theory the S7000 could/should handle it all itself. The reporting, ability to do hard or soft quotas, email alerts, etc. in FSRM are all very nice, but I could live without them if the S7000 would just give me a fixed hard quota.

 

There's a Fishworks feedback address, and in the past I've had success with using it to submit bugs (although not necessarily feature requests). Is there any interest in getting together and sending an email to them to request this? If a couple of you are interested, PM your email address (and a name if you wish) and I'll put together an email to the Fishworks team and CC you.

 

Cheers,

Chris

 

That is a good idea - I think there is already a bug for this been created but it looks like no action has been taken on it.

 

Bug ID: 6902902 ZFS should support a default setting for user/group quotas

 

I have also just logged a call with sun to see what they say. I will PM my email address now.

[teejay]

We're not far off the same size as you Duke, just over 1400.

Yes it needs managing, but most of that we can do through scripts and it really hasn't added any more work, it's just part of our regular monitoring. If we find something like loads of uncompressed video files, we deal with it through their class teacher who after all are there to teach them how to do this properly, including file management.

We do set a total data limit on the whole share, but that is set extremely high and is just there to prevent something silly happening.

Our next relaxation of computer policies is giving the students the ability to customise their desktops from September, I'm a glutton for punishment ;-)

[sjl]

Not having to use quotas was one of our main reasons for moving to the 7000's as it was causing far too many problems. Our students do a lot of audio/video work across the curriculum, plus use some pretty serious software in technology now and quotas were just getting in the way. Has more storage been used, well yes, because they needed to. We do get the odd student do something stupid like copying their whole mp3 collection into the user area, but random checks and using the school behavioural policy to deal with this has worked very well.

So the question is, do you really need to enforce hard quotas?

 

 

I doubt the main reason for choosing your 7000 was that it lacked a feature, mine was the quality of kit you get for the price but I understand what you are saying. Everyone wants more storage now and it is a big part of our job policing the available disk space. I would sooner have that administrative headache than a group of users filling all the storage up while I’m away on holiday – and that would probably just be the staff!

 

It works well for us to give 250MB and if they want more they have to come and see us so we can pilfer through their user area for games, music and videos. They soon get the message that if they run out of space just delete some of the games or other junk they have. After that we increase in 50MB increments for them if there area is full with legitimate work.

 

What’s annoying is the system is so close to having a decent quota system, for me it’s just lacking a default quota setting. Like Duke said I could live without the rest of the features.

Edited July 30, 2010 by sjl

[teejay]

Sorry, I'll rephrase that, our requirement was for a high capacity storage solution, individual user quotas wasn't a requirement after we decided with SLT etc not to use them.

Games etc are picked up through our regular scans and dealt with through the behaviour system, quotas are irrelevant for this.

We have users who at times are using 10-20Gb, once they've finished the project and don't need the raw files that drops down to a sensible level. That is the flexibility we need and for us it works very well, but that's the fun with education, what works well in one school may not work well in another. When the issue was first raised, I was strongly against removing quotas, but once the issues were worked through we came up with a workable solution.

[Duke]

I have also just logged a call with sun to see what they say. I will PM my email address now.

 

Cheers mate, I shall do an email today.

[sjl]

I have decided for this year to present the storage via a virtual Server with FSRM to control the Quotas etc. It's a shame the S7000's do not have these features such as file screening, auditing and a decent quota system - Hopefully they are in the pipeline.

[Duke]

Okay, here goes:

 

To anyone in the same position as sjl and I - we have raised a feature request with Oracle/Sun for consideration so that quotas can be implemented in the style we would like. In order for this request to be considered, it has to meet several requirements, one of which is enough requests from users.

 

If you are using your S7000 for home directories and would like a better system for managing quotas, please consider doing the following:

 

1) I have documented the style of quotas we would like (think Windows Server FSRM), so make sure you're talking about the same thing by clicking HERE (UPDATED)

 

REMOVED - SEE POST BELOW

 

Thanks in advance to those that are able to help,

 

Chris

Edited August 6, 2010 by Duke