Today I attended a Sun presentation called "Open Storage Systems". I attended both for my "day-job", that is, an IT consultant, as well as wearing my "Ubuntu Server hat". I'm not able to provide you with a word-for-word, blow-by-blow account of my morning, nor am I wanting to either promote or bag the presentation. The intent of my email to the group is to report on a development that I thought might interact/intersect or be of interest to the team.
Some disclaimers up front. I am an IT consultant, that is, I solve weird and wonderful problems for weird and wonderful clients all around the world, but mostly rural and remote Australia. I've been in this industry for over 26 years, so I'm probably a lot cynical about "revolutionary" things. I've never bought any Sun hardware, though a Sparc station did land on my desk some years ago where I coerced it into running Debian at the time. I've never deployed a storage system, never bought one and until recently never needed one. If anything in what I write here is contradicted by what Sun says, perhaps you should ask Sun before relying on what I said. The presentation attracted me because it was touted as an Open Source solution and I was interested to know how Sun was dealing with this and how this might relate to anything I was doing either as a consultant or as a member of the server team. The opening remarks were along the lines of "each CPU in a data centre achieves about 15% utilisation, and each storage solution is closed, proprietary, firmware driven hardware that requires additional licenses and subscriptions to activate new features. Sun has a solution that is open and will save you up to 90% in your storage deployments". At this point I thought, cool, let's see what you got. The release discussed the Sun Storage 7000 series which is basically a Sun box that runs Open Solaris that offers a web-based GUI that allows you to manage this. The drives are spread among SATA/SAS/SSD (and if I recall correctly, SCSI as well). A big deal was made of the time that it takes to get data off a drive and how SSD storage in between the CPU and the drive would handle this by caching the data in smart ways. (This is being handled by ZFS.) The box is built using Intel and/or AMD processors - the talk was sponsored by AMD, but I was unclear if the Intel reference was compatibility, as in an AMD processor that is compatible, or if it was because Intel also contributes hardware - in any case, I don't think it matters that much - but I'm sure that there are some reading this who are cringing at that thoughtless remark - I'm sorry, educate me please :) Much was made of services that can be activated, NFS, CIFS, HTTP, FTP, WebDAV, DNS, NTP, AntiVirus and many others. The box is "certified" for MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft, VMware, blah, blah. (More on that later.) It does iSCSI, block-level stuff, fibre-channel, and other (mumble) protocols. So it's able to do the same as all the other storage systems in the world. There are web pages that describe this and a quick google found this one: http://blogs.sun.com/studler/entry/new_class_of_storage_systems. The web GUI is cute. It shows hardware level information, showing which DIMM is faulty, allowing you to put a blinking light on a drive to get the engineer on-site to swap out a drive, serial numbers, etc. Logging is continuous and data is stored on a system partition. Analysis can be done over this data and information can be exported via CSV. There is cool stuff, you can repartition a system from mirrored to raid 6 in seconds, build a new system in less than 5 minutes from new, comes with lots of expansion options and appears to be well placed when compared to other "Enterprise" stuff. Much of this functionality appears to me be related to ZFS and not the web GUI as such - but I might be wrong. The pitch for this seemed to be that this device can replace a whole lot of infrastructure and because it's open it grows with the developer community - (that's "us Open Source folks"). At this point we got a demo and some point-and-click action. Then the presentation was over and we got to ask questions. My questions related to some of what was said and I opened up with "How do I interface this with other stuff? As in, how do I use my software to talk to your hardware?" The response was not good. Basically, you need to use their web-interface. I asked about web services. Most web-sites these days are not static files, with a web-server on board, how would I deploy a PHP or a PYTHON based web application and how does this relate to the HTTP server on board? The response was that I should run my own web-server hardware and mount the "appliance" across the network using NFS or CIFS. I began to wonder what the purpose of the web-server compatibility and service was. If I used Active Directory or LDAP to authenticate user share access, could I use the same infrastructure to manage the actual shares, that is, could I define and manage my shares in LDAP and have the appliance use that information. "Sure, you'll need to write the software to do that, but sure - actually, the answer wasn't that at all, it was 'uhm, dunno, uhm not in this release.'" If I want to manage the thing using HP OpenView, or anything not Sun, could I do that? "Sure, but you'd need to write your own software to manage that - actually the answer was, no, but I suppose you could write software to do that, it's using Open Solaris and the APIs are published." If I wanted to have a fail over system, could I do that at a block level? "No, not in this release." How is the Oracle and MySQL certification? "Well, you mount the drive and it's certified." So, if I log-in and add a service, what does that do to my service agreement? "It voids your agreement." So, if I cannot talk to anything not Sun and I cannot install anything on the device, how is this Open Source? "Well, you need to know that it's running Open Solaris, so you can build your own system like this and run with that, but you won't get the web GUI and none of the integration." So, coming in the door thinking, wow, Sun has an Open Storage system that might be able to be managed and deployed in a Ubuntu Server environment, I went out the door thinking, Sun has built a system that could be really nice, but instead they've built another proprietary solution that doesn't really talk to anything else and cannot really be managed in anything but a single deployment. So, the 15% CPU utilisation is still the same, you cannot use the Sun based server to run anything because it voids your support contract and it doesn't talk to anything without voiding your contract. Afterwards I had lunch with a guy from LSI where we discussed iSCSI block level devices also made by Sun. I need to deploy a Windows machine to manage it and I need to deploy a front end to talk to users. So, I suppose you could format the hard-drive(s) on this 7000 series hardware and install Ubuntu Server, but that seems to miss the point. (One answer involved installing Windows on the machine :) I'm left with a feeling that I'm unsure how and if we could (or should) evolve Ubuntu Server to integrate with systems like this to make Ubuntu more enterprise ready. It's entirely possible that I've got a distorted picture of I.T. in my head, one where you can manage your storage in a central location, regardless of where the actual drive is, that you can refer to it almost as a cloud and manage the various aspects in an almost transparent fashion, but thus far this does not appear to be the case. I don't know if I did the Sun presentation justice, I'm not a journalist and I have a bias, but I hope that this gives more people information about something I attended. If others have seen presentations that they feel relate to the Ubuntu-Server community, I'd personally love to read other reports which would allow me to "virtually" attend more presentations across more areas. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06" - E115°50'39" (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)() ..ASCII for Onno.. |>>? ..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 8888 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- ubuntu-server mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-server More info: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ServerTeam
