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Hebdenlad

By Hebdenlad
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Hebdenlad

Hebdenlad

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Morning all,

 

Even thought Mr Paton has pipped me at the post by working late at night I have to put something official on here from Oracle regarding the new models from Oracle - and he's probably still in his bed at this time :o

 

So you will see from the link below that we have announced some new models in the ZFS Storage Appliance range (new name for the family).

 

There will be 3 new models available from the middle of October 2010 starting with the new S7120 that starts at 12TB and scales out with the addition of the new SAS2 disk shelves to 120TB (using the new 2TB SAS drives). In addition the S7120 supports write flash capability using the F20 card which is also deployed to great effect in our standard servers and the Exadata device.

 

The next model is the S7320 which starts at 20TB and goes out to 192TB and supports both read and write flash giving true HSP capability. You can also cluster the S7320 for even greater resilience.

 

The final model that is being released is the S7420. This, like the S7320, starts at 20TB but with the addition of extra SAS2 disk shelves scales out to 1.1PB - which should hopefully be sufficient for you edugeekers :-)

 

These new ZFS Storage Appliances are all based on the latest Intel Nehelam chip and can support up to 1TB of DRAM (S7420) and use the SAS2 drives to deliver even greater throughput and performance.

 

If you need any further detail or information then please do not hesitate to contact me.

 

Cheers,

 

Phil

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dhicks

dhicks

Posted
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the new S7120 that starts at 12TB and scales out with the addition of the new SAS2 disk shelves to 120TB (using the new 2TB SAS drives).

 

Could you give us a vauge idea of price for a 12TB S7120?

 

--

David Hicks

john

john

Posted
Posted (edited)

Thanks Phil, sounds very shiny stuff :) Looking forward to hearing how they get on in the education market :)

 

Could you give us a vauge idea of price for a 12TB S7120?

 

--

David Hicks

 

I believe the lovely people at The Cutter Project (linescanner on here) can assist you with that David, for the spec, space and kit I am sure you will be pleasantly surprised with it :)

Edited by john
Duke

Duke

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Whoop, finally! Been waiting months for this... Talking with Andy @ Cutter about SGD in half an hour, however I feel the conversation may rapidly deviate to an S7120!

 

Phil - Would a 7120 with the new Nehalem, an F20 and 16GB RAM (or is 32GB the minimum now?) likely offer better performance than our current 7410 with Opterons, 16GB RAM, 2 Logs and 1 read? Just wondering which would be best for the primary unit in a mirror?

Duke

Duke

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@Duke: Surely you want to get another 7410 so that you can cluster them ;)

 

At the moment replication/mirroring is a higher priority than clustering, although I'd like clustered heads at some point.

 

Zero downtime with clustered heads would be great, but a minimised downtime of the server room going up in flames and it falling over to a 7120 elsewhere on site is more important to us from a DR/business continuity point of view. Clustering only saves me if a head fails - if the disk tray dies, power goes out, or a plane crashes into the room I'm still screwed. ;)

 

Just spoken to Andy at Cutter and these things may be silly cheap for enterprise storage!

Soulfish

Soulfish

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At the moment replication/mirroring is a higher priority than clustering, although I'd like clustered heads at some point.

 

Zero downtime with clustered heads would be great, but a minimised downtime of the server room going up in flames and it falling over to a 7120 elsewhere on site is more important to us from a DR/business continuity point of view. Clustering only saves me if a head fails - if the disk tray dies, power goes out, or a plane crashes into the room I'm still screwed. ;)

 

Just spoken to Andy at Cutter and these things may be silly cheap for enterprise storage!

 

I wish they were silly cheap when we tendered for our new storage system a few months ago :(. Still a rack full of EMC gear is still pretty nice :D

john

john

Posted
Posted
I wish they were silly cheap when we tendered for our new storage system a few months ago :(. Still a rack full of EMC gear is still pretty nice :D

 

its just NOT shiny unlike my growing rack of Sun / Oracle storage :D

Duke

Duke

Posted
Posted
its just NOT shiny unlike my growing rack of Sun / Oracle storage :D

 

Speaking of which, we were thinking about taking a polishing wheel to our S7410 + J4400 and telling people we had 'mirrored' storage... :biggrin1:

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Soulfish

Soulfish

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Speaking of which, we were thinking about taking a polishing wheel to our S7410 + J4400 and telling people we had 'mirrored' storage... :biggrin1:

 

Hahahaha that'd make a great photo :D

Hebdenlad

Hebdenlad

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Speaking of which, we were thinking about taking a polishing wheel to our S7410 + J4400 and telling people we had 'mirrored' storage... :biggrin1:

 

Hmmm. Humour classes call for Mr Smith....

john

john

Posted
Posted
Nope! - I don't think Phil's speaking to me any more after Andy at Cutter told me thing he shouldn't. :D

Oh dear are you a naughty boy!!

Duke

Duke

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Posted

Lol...

 

Anyway, to bring this back on track:

 

1) Is anyone buying a 7720 and if so can I come and work for them?

 

2) How do people feel the competition mounts up against the new 7x20 stuff? As far as I'm concerned, the big plus is still the Fishworks OS which beats anything else I've seen from a usability and management point of view (although I still want my user quotas done properly). Soulfish - how have found the EMC kit in comparison?

Soulfish

Soulfish

Posted
Posted
Lol...

 

Anyway, to bring this back on track:

 

1) Is anyone buying a 7720 and if so can I come and work for them?

 

2) How do people feel the competition mounts up against the new 7x20 stuff? As far as I'm concerned, the big plus is still the Fishworks OS which beats anything else I've seen from a usability and management point of view (although I still want my user quotas done properly). Soulfish - how have found the EMC kit in comparison?

 

 

Well they've been willing to give us the earth to get our business (I have a stack of 200gb SSDs next to me that I need to install :D), but it's certainly not the most straightforward system in the world! Doesn't help that from my understanding of things it's three separate systems that are glued together to give NAS + SAN functionality. Still once I actually manage to find the download for their new "unified" management tool I'll let you know how good it is :p

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Hebdenlad

Hebdenlad

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Well they've been willing to give us the earth to get our business (I have a stack of 200gb SSDs next to me that I need to install :D), but it's certainly not the most straightforward system in the world! Doesn't help that from my understanding of things it's three separate systems that are glued together to give NAS + SAN functionality. Still once I actually manage to find the download for their new "unified" management tool I'll let you know how good it is :p

 

so how are your SSDs being used? Are they read optimised or write optimised? Hope your glue works :-)

Soulfish

Soulfish

Posted
Posted
so how are your SSDs being used? Are they read optimised or write optimised? Hope your glue works :-)

 

They're STEC ZeusIOPS SSDs, so no idea what optimisations (if any!) have been done by STEC. We're about to use 6 of them to act as extended cache for the system using the new EMC FAST Cache system that they've just released. Any additional drives are being used in a standard RAID group for very fast access to certain databases/VDI images.

 

I'm a big believer in the Sun/Oracle storage systems - I can safely say that currently the S7000 was a million times easier to setup and start using. Just a shame that Oracle couldn't discount to the same level as EMC :)

Hebdenlad

Hebdenlad

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They're STEC ZeusIOPS SSDs, so no idea what optimisations (if any!) have been done by STEC. We're about to use 6 of them to act as extended cache for the system using the new EMC FAST Cache system that they've just released. Any additional drives are being used in a standard RAID group for very fast access to certain databases/VDI images.

 

I'm a big believer in the Sun/Oracle storage systems - I can safely say that currently the S7000 was a million times easier to setup and start using. Just a shame that Oracle couldn't discount to the same level as EMC :)

 

So looking at the FAST Cache info on the net it seems that EMC have only given you half the answer - i.e. addressing read performance and not write performance as well - hence you still need lots of spinning drives to maximise write performance. Also, how do you know that you need those SSDs? Does the EMC stuff have analytics nowadays? would be interested to see the interface at some point if you're OK with that? I'll bring the bikkies :-)

linescanner

linescanner

Posted
Posted
Nope! - I don't think Phil's speaking to me any more after Andy at Cutter told me thing he shouldn't. :D

 

That will be me in it with Phil. Try to help someone out and they drop you in it..............sigh. We at Cutter are too nice for our own good.

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Duke

Duke

Posted
Posted
That will be me in it with Phil. Try to help someone out and they drop you in it..............sigh. We at Cutter are too nice for our own good.

 

You only told me they weren't official prices, not that they were keep-quiet prices! Anyway, I assumed that Phil (being an Oracle employee and all) would have more info than you... I forgot to ask in my email, could you let me know whether a couple of 10GbE cards are going reasonable or crazy money too? :)

 

Anyway, attempting again to get back on track - Looks like Oracle/Sun are again onto a winner with this stuff, I've got my fingers crossed we can invest in it again soon. Soulfish - Sounds like a similar experience to our NetApp stuff. Potentially very nice kit, but nowhere near as easy to set up or manage as the S7000. They'll undercut their prices to get you into it, but then you can't afford to upgrade the hardware or get new licences. :(

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