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Saturday Jan 27, 2007

Availability Suite and ZFS – Putting Adaptive Endian-ness to the Test

Since Availability Suite has the means to replicate data between two or more computers, it is often presented with the situation of operating in a mixed version environment, and more recently with Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris, a mixed architecture environment.

Availability Suite supports SNDR replication between all shipping versions of the product, being AVS 3.2 for Solaris 8 and 9, AVS 4.0 for Solaris 10, and now (or very soon to be now), AVS 4.1 for OpenSolaris. This capability offers a vast array of replication options, options available without being forced to upgrade to a new version of the product, or new version of Solaris.

With the support of both SPARC and x64/86 architectures in Availability Suite 4.x, it presents the option of replicating data between the two different architectures supported by Solaris. At the onset this may seem like a good thing, but as it turns out only one Solaris filesystem is endian neutral at the block level, and that filesystem is ZFS!

As quoted from the paper “ZFS: the last word in file systems”, available on OpenSolaris web site at: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/docs/zfs_last.pdf

“ZFS is supported on both SPARC and x86 platforms. More important, ZFS is endian-neutral. You can easily move disks from a SPARC server to an x86 server. Neither architecture pays a byte-swapping tax due to Sun's patent-pending "adaptive endian-ness" technology, which is unique to ZFS.”

This ability to use Availability Suite to replicate ZFS filesystems between different Solaris architectures, is yet another example of the sum of the parts (AVS & ZFS), being greater then the whole!

As ZFS becomes the filesystem of choice, having the means to replicate it with Availability Suite, without regard to the architecture of the system on the target host, will be a key differentiator of OpenSolaris, as the storage platform of choice.

Posted at 10:13PM Jan 27, 2007 by jilokrje in Sun | Comments[6] | Permalink

Comments:

Sun just does not understand even the basics about naming its products. Is the intention really to confuse customers ? There is a "Java Availability Suite" and now there is "Availability Suite" in Solaris. Just go read your own webpage, http://www.sun.com/software/ You guys are brain dead!

Posted by whatever! on January 28, 2007 at 12:59 AM EST #

What's in a name? I've always considered it a form of praise one when someone copies something of yours, and then uses it to enhance their appearance to others. This appears to be the case with the name "Availability Suite". It is my understanding that the first product to use the name, and still does, is the Sun Netra High Availability Suite, a TelCo solution from Sun. Interesting enough, this product uses the SNDR component of Sun StorageTek Availability Suite as its underlying replication technology. Next came a proliferation of 'suites' under the title "Storage ONEvision", creating the StorEdge Availability Suite, StorEdge Performance Suite and StorEdge Utilization Suite. For reasons unknown to me, the latter two suites have dropped their 'suite' name, and the products have reverted back to their old product names. As project lead, I thought it best to keep then 'suite' name, as the old product names, StorEdge Data Services, including Instant Image (II) and StorEdge Network Data Replicator (SNDR), seemed no better. Shortly thereafter, and of a surprise to me came, Java Availability Suite, a name given to the combination of Solaris Cluster software, including Sun Cluster, Sun Cluster GeoGraphic Edition and various Sun Cluster Agents. Interesting enough, the Sun Cluster GeoGraphic edition also uses SNDR as one of its underlying replication technologies, and both parts of the Sun StorageTek Availability Suite; SNDR and II, are supported HA data services in Solaris Cluster. Another 'naming' thing you may have noticed is that Sun is phasing out the usage of StorEdge in place of StorageTek, the latter having more name recognition. Yes this whole naming thing may appear "brain dead" at times, but in some situations like above, it is too many brains, all thinking that they should capitalize on key wording, such as Availability Suite, that comes into play here. I guess if I was in marketing instead of engineering, I would be able to see beyond the name, and look at the marketing impact it represents.

Posted by Jim Dunham on January 28, 2007 at 06:53 PM EST #

Could you please add RSS feed ?

Posted by przemol on January 30, 2007 at 07:21 AM EST #

RSS Feeds are now available.

Posted by Jim Dunham on January 30, 2007 at 08:01 AM EST #

The naming is even more complex than this. SNDR was originally RDC (Remote Dual Copy) and II was DSW (DataShadow). Sometime after the 1.0 release marketing decided to change the names to SNDR and II. This is also why the SNDR internals are still named using the "rdc" nomenclature, as we weren't keen on changing all the code whenever the product name changed.

Posted by Simon Crosland on February 19, 2007 at 07:00 AM EST #

It wouldn't be quite such a hassle if finding the product wasn't such a difficult chore. Searching the Sun downloads for "Availability Suite" is just an exercise in frustration. Sure you can find a few products with that name, but not quite the one you're hoping for. I agree with the Whatever!, Sun's naming is braindead. And only made harder each time the name changes.

Posted by Ryan on February 21, 2007 at 07:15 PM EST #

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