OpenStorage
Sun launched it's OpenStorage line last week at CEC, and I'm not gonna lie...it's products like this that make me proud to work at Sun. For those who weren't at CEC you can see the presentation here : http://www.sun.com/launch/2008-1110/index.jsp
Let me just highlight some of the features that I believe put this above other vendors storage:
- DTRACE - 'nuff said? The ability to deep dive into service calls, to find out which protocols (NFS/CIFS/etc..), which clients, which storage pools, etc.. The ability to properly troubleshoot and issue cannot be underestimated. It's a fantastic development that will prevent a lot of "wheel spinning" when problems pop-up.
- ZFS - I was a fanboy of NetApp's WAFL filesystem, but ZFS has literally changed the playing field of storage.
- Hybrid storage - RAM, SSD, and regular HDs together to increase performance
Check it out for yourself: http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/unified_storage/
I was able to talk to some of the engineers during CEC and got a close-up of some of these features. I highly recommend checking out a demo if possible to really see how easy this system is to use, yet feature rich to meet performance and troubleshooting needs.
I would love to see some of this backported to the thumper platforms, and can't wait for the future of this technology. However, if you are running into performance issue with your current storage platforms, If you want to purchase a storage platform thats optimized for YOUR needs, then this is the place to look!
