Hebdenlad

you need to drill down on the disk and see what it is that is causing the performance issue. you can see both reads and writes there plus the percentage of each. Are you replicating to another S7110?

Which was the one you replaced?

Hi there you probably will need to contact your local Oracle support people to get this resolved. Chris (Duke) is right in what he says about firmware on the drives and storage vendors restricting third party drives being installed in their storage arrays. Are you sure the old drive has failed? What messages did you get from the array prior to replacing the drive? Drop me a line on here and I'll see what else I can do to help. Regards, Phil

Today, there was a very dramatic price change on the entire 7000 family. List prices on our ZFSSA hardware are now around 50% lower as of 13th September 2011. This price change will really benefit those clients who are looking at any model 7x20, as well as those who already own one and are looking to expand and add some Readzillas, Logzillas, RAM, or disk trays to their systems. Those of you who have a valid 7000 series system already are grandfathered in for all of your current software licensing just as you always had. Going forward as of September 13th, however, we are getting much lower base prices on the systems partly due to being able to price separately two current features and one new software feature. The new one is HCC (Hybrid Columnar Compression). This is very exciting, as until now the only hardware on the planet that you could use this Oracle 11gR2 feature with was Exadata. Now Exadata is great, but might be far too large and powerful for some people who just need a place to store a small to medium sized data warehouse. The HCC feature in it however was something many people wanted in order to have fantastic compression and greater performance of their Oracle DB. Now you can do it using the ZFSSA behind your database server without using an Exadata. This is an add-on license, and certainly is only needed by a small set of ZFSSA users. The two current software features that are now add-on line items are Remote Replication and Clones. It was found that these features were not being used by a majority of our clients, so they put them into the ‘software license’ bucket, bringing the base prices down even further. Now, I know what you’re thinking and believe me, I thought the same thing. The ZFSSA has always been about no extra software licenses, ever. I was upset about this, but held my tongue until today so I could see the results of a quote with all the licenses added back in. It turns out that with the new prices, even if you add all three licenses, it's still far less than the old price from yesterday! If you don’t need HCC or replication, it’s even less. It’s really a win-win. A few things to remember: 1. These licenses are a one-time thing per controller. Not per TB. So it doesn’t matter if you add more storage later, you still never pay more licenses. 2. If you had a system, or a valid quote for a system, before September 13th, you are ‘grandfathered’ into the license structure and get all of your software licenses at no additional costs (Except HCC which is new). Only new quotes going forward will need the Replication or Clone or HCC line items, per controller. All in all, this is very good news, and I have already re-created four quotes for four of my local customers, and every one of them is dramatically less than before. So enjoy, and go get some new drive trays. The 300GB and 600GB 15K speed drives are out, also at reduced prices. Be sure to understand that they need to be in different pools from the 7,200 speed drives!

Hi there, Thanks for the posting. Let's talk about this tomorrow. You can reach me via email ([email protected]) or via the main switchboard (0118 924 0000).

Trevor, 3.4 is out now so you may want to go that latest version. Hope all is well in Huddersfield. WR Phil

Thanks Andy! Seriously though. If anyone has issues then please, please contact me either on here or via my Oracle email address ([email protected]). The only way we can fix your issues and address your concerns is if we hear back from you so please call or email me if you have issues or concerns. WR Phil

Looking at the CoRAID website they only have a very small presence in the UK. I'd personally be worried about ongoing support and what happens if they decide the UK market isn't for them. You'd be left holding a SAN with nowhere to go....

Hi there. I know a fair bit about the S7xxx range from Oracle. give me a call to chat about VMs and iSCSI / NFS on our entry level storage devices...

give me a call on tuesday. 0118 924 0000 and ask for Phi Lawrence.

Morning all! Please find below a link to the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance Deduplication Design and Implementation Guidelines web page. This has been written by one of my extremely learned colleagues Jeff Wright so I cannot take credit for this one :-) Sun ZFS Storage Appliance Deduplication Design and Implementation Guidelines Hope you enjoy reading this and as ever, any questions then please do not hesitate to contact me. Enjoy your weekend. Warmest regards, Phil

Good morning edugeekers. Long time since I've posted on here but some news for you... A micro release of the 2010.Q3 software has been posted. Software Updates - Fishworks - wikis.sun.com This 2010.Q3.2.1 micro release contains fixes in the Infiniband subsystem. The bugs addressed here affect clients running heavy streaming write workloads over IPoIB. These problems are not unique to any one application but they have been seen with Exadata RMAN back-up clients using 16 or more channels. Customers wanting to connect Exadata to S7000 as their back-up storage should upgrade to this release. Please review carefully the list of CR’s that have been addressed and all release notes prior to upgrading. https://wikis.sun.com/display/FishWorks/ak-2010.08.17.2.1+Release+Notes The 2010.Q3.2.1 upgrade applies to all 7000 supported platforms including the simulator. Regards, Phil

So, the entry level S7120 is 12TB (12x 1TB drives) but as with all other vendors who recommend a RAID (not stripe) you will never get the full RAW capacity as usable. What RAID level you want / need depends on the business and application need. The good thing with the S7x20 range is that once you buy your chosen box there re no, I repeat, no licences to buy for whatever protocol you intend to use. The box supports compression, think provisioning, de-duplication (at a block level and in-line, not post process like NetApp), NFS, iSCSI, SMB< FC, IB and so on and on and on. It also has analytics - ask on here about how damn good that is - and again included in the cost of the box. Chat to some of the guys on here who have used them for feedback - mine tends to be slightly biased as you can appreciate. We have some really good Oracle partners who are on here too and they can help you out in terms of configurations and all that stuff. If you have any questions then please do not hesitate to contact me. Cheers, Phil

Or for real peace of mind if you're REALLY concerned about data loss / guarantee then simply use ZFS as your filesystem (ZFS - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) and get lots of good things for free, like unlimited snapshots, software RAID (RAID5, RAID6, Mirror, Triple Parity RAID), deduplication, NFS, SMB, iSCSI, etc., etc. ZFS is free to download and use and as it is a Copy on Write filesystem you can avoid lots of nasty things that other filesystems may being you (silent data corruption, bad blocks, phantom writes, etc.). Just my tuppence worth. Phil

Hi, not sure about this... Let me see if I canget hold of my Australian opposite number...

Hi there, So the systems that support ZFS are the S7x20 range (Sun Unified Storage | Flash Optimized Storage | Oracle). These use the latest Intel Nehelam and Westmere CPUs and support read and write SSDs (model dependant). If you need more information then drop me a line and I can put you in touch with your local Oracle storage sales person Regards, Phil

Morning all. So.... what you really need is data integrity (i.e. knowing that when you write a block of data to your filesystem you are safe in the knowledge that you can read it back at any point in the future). There is only one filesystem that can guarantee this.... ZFS (and to save me writing shed loads look here: ZFS - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). Any form of RAID only gives you protection against disk failure and allows you to carry on (albeit at a reduced performance rate) whilst the parity is rebuilt on the hot spare. With ZFS the parity is only rebuilt on the blocks that are used. So for example, if you have a RAID set made up of 2TB drives (not uncommon nowadays) with 100GB of used capacity and you have a situation where one fails and the hot spare kicks in you only rebuilds the parity on the 200GB and NOT the whole drive like other filesystems will force you to do. This means your "slow down" is considerable less. Regarding the read and write performance issues noted above, ZFS is the only "SSD aware" filesystem. What that means is ZFS understands about SSDs and uses them intelligently for both reads and writes to drive greater performance thus alleviating the need for "tiers of storage" and the associated management overhead maintaining data in the correct tier. I am more than happy to explain this in detail off forum if anyone wants to know more. Regards, Phil

Hear, hear! Well done lads. Thoroughly deserved in my humble opinion. Phil

Hi there, Thanks for the posting. Who over in Africa is looking after you? Is it our people out of South Africa? They should be able to help you at a local level but in the meantime... we have had no reports of "lost files" in an S7000 configuration. The challenge some people face is ensuring that they are running the latest code and setting the relevant permissions based on the data in the CIFS shares. As Chris *Duke) has pointed out there is a wealth of information available regarding CIFS/SMB implementation on the S7000 and I think you'll find that most people on here who have the S7000 are using them in a Windows environment. If you need any more help then please do not hesitate to contact me on here. Warmest regards, Phil

All, for an idea of how Oracle are doing in the world of flash please attend the following: Oracle Storage Solutions Happy New Year and hopefully see you at BETT later this year. Phil

Chris, we haven't actually implemented any new features in this code release. Typically new features are released in the major Q1 and Q3 releases. We use the minor ones (like this one) for bug fixes and enhancements to the application support. Hence we now "certify" Symantec Backup Exec running against the S7000 range. I'll see what I can find out about the issue you have but it might be a Backup Exec thing rather than an S7000 thing.... WR Phil

Chris, It means that we provide support for Symantec Backup Exec on the S7000 range. We had it in the very early days but Symantec rewrote a great deal of the code and we needed to re-certify it. This work has been done and it is now fully supported providing the relevant version is used and the hotfixes applied as per the posting. I do have to state that "there are other backup software applications available from other vendors" some of which may or may not be supported on the S7000. WR Phil

Good news Edugeekers! With the release of 2010.Q3.2 we now have support for Symantec BackupExec 2010 R2. On the 7000 side, 2010.Q3.2 is the bare minimum for support, it is absolutely required to upgrade to this version in order to integrate with BackupExec. On the BackupExec side, BackupExec 2010 R2 with DDI Hotfix 20101215 is absolutely required. This is the first software release that will recognize the 7000 appliance. HCL Link: Enterprise Support - Symantec Corp. - Backup Exec 2010|2010 R2 Hardware (HCL) Hotfix Link: Enterprise Support - Symantec Corp. - Backup Exec 2010 R2 revision 4164 Hotfix 143981 (DDI20101215 Device Driver Installer) All 700 platforms are supported (both the 7x10 and 7x20) Happy New Year to you all and hopefully see you at BETT this year. Oracle have a small presence this year as it's the first time we've done it and are testing it out so please come and visit our stand. Here's the link to it on the BETT website: Bett 2011 : Floor Plan Warmest regards, Phil

John, just do it.... you know it makes sense. And Andy, thanks for putting this new up on here. Hope everyone had a great Christmas and New Year.

And the guys in the development team are still having fun! you should see what's coming down the line.... but there I've said too much already...