Taylor's Take on Sun Storage

An Easier Storage Platform - OpenSolaris

With data growth, higher energy costs and the emergence of Web 2.0 applications that demand scalable storage at low costs - vendors, end users and market analysts are focusing more on storage architectures.  Storage economics need to change - a fundamental change that can only happen at the infrastructure level.  

Key to any system is the operating system or platform.  OSes obviously hold tremendous importance when evaluating servers - what type of OS and applications are supported?  Historically, the underlying OS has not mattered as much in storage.  Or at least compatibility and interoperability has mattered more.  As long as my storage supports a Mainframe/Unix/Linux/Windows environment, what do I care about the OS?

Storage Platforms
In the open systems market today, the storage OS matters more than ever before.  Adding data services at the OS level can change storage economics and increase storage performance and efficiency.   Using a common storage platform can save on training and admin costs.  Using an open source OS can speed innovation, increase flexibility and save on software costs.

HP is using Windows Storage Server as a storage platform; EMC is leveraging the economics and flexibility of Linux inside its Centera archive product; and NetApp has built its own storage platform - Data ONTAP (originally leveraging FreeBSD open source code).

Sun offers Solaris and OpenSolaris (to see the difference b/w the two, click here). OpenSolaris is the platform for Sun's Open Storage offerings which provides open access to developers (something the storage platforms or implementations mentioned above do not...)

An Easier OpenSolaris
Today Sun announced an easy-to-use OpenSolaris at the 2008 CommunityOne Developer conference.   There are several benefits to using OpenSolaris and ZFS as a storage platform - built-in data integrity, snapshot software, volume management and software RAID being a few.  But one request the developer community had of OpenSolaris was ease of use - easier to get, install, use, maintain and support.  Especially compared to Linux in the open source realm. 

Today's announcement is just that - it comes from "Project Indiana" which has been underway for the past year after Ian Murdock joined Sun.  Ian is the former Linux Foundation CTO and Debian founder (one of the first Linux distributions.)

So what makes this OpenSolaris distribution easier?  An easier to use environment based on GNU-based utilities that's currently leveraged in the GNOME desktop and other applications (See Disk Usage Analyzer screen shot to right).  ZFS is also the default root file system now - and as mentioned above, ZFS has some pretty innovative features including a "rollback" option where you can essentially do a "Ctrl-Z" if a software installation or update goes bad.  OpenSolaris also includes a new Image Packaging System (IPS) software which enables easier access and downloads to a full suite of additional software.  Software updates have also been made easier.

OpenSolaris Support
Of course support is always a large question around anything open source.  Sun offers enterprise support for Solaris; support for its commercial storage products built from open storage components; and now Sun will offer two OpenSolaris subscription support offerings beginning May 13.  OpenSolaris Production Subscription Support will include 24x7 telephone support, online technical support and bug escalation services.   OpenSolaris Essential Subscription Support will include 8x5 business hour online technical support. 

OpenSolaris as a Storage Platform
It seems today there are three viable platforms to base a storage platform on that will stand the test of time - Linux, Windows and Solaris.   Sun and its community have invested heavily in Solaris as a storage platform - and even some die-hard Linux developers are noticing:

DigiTar is a Linux advocate, but when it came to storage they choose Solaris.  In his blog, DigiTar COO/CTO says, "it was storage that brought Solaris into our environment and continues to drive it deeper into our services stack.  Which begs the question: Why?  Isn't DTrace just as cool as ZFS?   Haven't Solaris Containers dramatically changed the way we provision and utilize systems?  Sure...but storage is what drives our business and it doesn't seem to me that we're alone." 

When the Linux developers at Nexenta decided to build "Enterprise Class Storage for Everyone" they choose OpenSolaris as their storage platform.   They could only accomplish their storage goals through Solaris.

The fact that OpenSolaris is getting easier to use is good for developers, the community and ultimately to customers.  Ease-of-use in addition to enterprise quality, data integrity and data services is a powerful combination....

---- Update ----

We announced that OpenSolaris can be run in a virtual computing environment (aka the cloud)!  See Jonathan's blog and the OpenSolaris service offered on Amazon EC2...

Posted at 03:44PM May 05, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[3]

Sun is on to something - Open Storage

I freely admit, when Sun announced its open source storage community a year go I was a skeptic.  Sure, open source has its play in software and servers - but storage?  

Well, after a year of watching Sun's open storage investments, industry-standard hardware used in enterprise storage and working within Sun on today's announcement - Sun Extends World's First Open Storage Platform - I think Sun is on to something...

Also read all about Sun Open Storage here.... 

I'll make a brief case for open storage and Sun's leadership in it here.   We have also developed a series of open storage White Papers that give more detail on the below info - I'll post them here.  

What is Open Storage? 

Here is a simple definition:  Open storage is the combination of open source software with industry-standard hardware to create enterprise-class storage systems

Open source software like Linux or OpenSolaris OS.  Open source applications like MySQL database software.  And Sun has been one of the first companies to break the barrier with higher-level open source storage applications which include:

• Volume Management
• Snapshot, Data Mirroring and Replication
• Hierarchal Storage Management (HSM)
• Fixed Content Archive
  
• And one of the most advanced file systems on the planet - ZFS (Which includes advanced software RAID, data integrity, self-healing and storage management services) 
  

Industry-standard hardware is typically available through multiple vendors and is very price-competitive.  Examples include x86 servers and standard FC/SATA/SAS disk drives.  One could also include LTO tape because it is an industry-standard tape technology - but I'll primarily focus on disk systems, as this is the market that will be most impacted by open storage. 

In an open storage architecture, the customer selects the best hardware and software for the job.  In contrast, almost all of today's disk arrays and NAS appliances are closed - customers are locked into using the vendor's disk drives, controllers and proprietary software. 

The irony being that a lot of closed systems are built from open source software and industry-standard hardware - helping vendor margins but not customer budgets     

The Evolution of disk Architectures  

Our brilliant disk analyst, Bruce Norikane, also points out that industry disk systems have been evolving to more open architectures over time and with each new market introduction.  A similar trend has also happened in the server market.  Consider the graphic below:   

Early disk systems were custom, proprietary engineering projects starting with IBM's SLED (Single Large Expensive Disk)  in 1956 where everything was custom.  Then in the 1980's a high-volume disk market emerged thanks to PCs and servers; and in the 1990's Enterprise RAID was adopted.  Enterprise RAID incorporated a custom disk controller and these new market drives.  Modular storage then hit the market, consisting of a separate controller and disk enclosures that fit in a standard rack - more flexible and affordable.  Most recently we have seen the RAIN (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Nodes) architecture emerge - distributed storage based on server technologies offering better scalability at a better price point.  RAIN architectures are largely based on industry-standard servers, operating systems and networks.  However, while RAIN systems leverage open components, they tend to be build as closed systems with locked-in components from traditional vendors.

The next logical step is open storage - industry-standard hardware and open source software that drive down storage economics and spur greater innovation.  Again, this storage systems evolution is not unlike what happened in the server world - where servers were large, proprietary and expensive years ago. Smaller, industry-standard servers and open source software changed the economics in the server market - and they are doing the same thing to storage.

Why Open Storage?   

Four reasons:

1. Enterprise-class storage:  Systems that offer as much or more quality, reliability and data integrity as closed systems.  Sounds like a stretch?  Just see the InfoWorld review of Sun's x86, SATA, open source software-based archive solution.  It scored perfect 10s in reliability and scalability.  Let's also not forget that ZFS offers 19 9s of data integrity with predictive, self-healing features.          

2. An Open Storage Software Community:   This is important if you are a developer, a company that has developers or a company that is planning on hiring developers to differentiate through IT.  When we launched OpenSolaris Storage last year we had only a handful of open source projects - we now have over 30.  The OpenSolaris community has more than 96,000 registered members in all.  Why is this important?  Customers don't have to wait on a vendor for the features they need - they can find new innovations in the community or develop features themselves.  Innovation is not held back by vendor objectives or limited R&D budgets...  

3. Breakthrough Economics:  Probably the most compelling argument for open storage and why open storage is needed today.   The best way to understand how open storage can impact storage economics is through an overly-simplistic diagram of a closed system:

Now consider an open storage architecture:

In a nutshell, storage applications are free from licensing costs and open to developers.  Open storage users can choose the platform their IT staff is most familiar with.   An industry-standard server with ZFS (which again includes RAID, data management and data integrity features) can take the place on an expensive controller.   And affordable, market-priced disks can be deployed under the system - even fast and cheap JBOD if you leverage ZFS.

To see the real-world impact we compared some closed systems vs. open systems using Ideas International pricing:

In full disclosure, these are US list prices.  We did configure every system to be as close in capacity as possible using affordable SATA drives in most every configuration.  And finally, certain applications, features and environments simply must run higher-end arrays today - I am not implying that everyone throw out their closed storage and go with 100% open.  But at this economic price difference - users will be compelled to determine which applications and which data should migrate to more open storage - and we presume the data center mix of open vs. closed storage will change over time.         

You can also read about the open storage impact in the VTL space here...

4. Dynamic Scalability: Lastly, the ability to dynamically and efficiently scale to meet today's huge data demand has become business critical, especially with emerging Web 2.0 applications.  Sun sells systems that scale from less than 10TB to greater than 100PBs.   And OpenSolaris ZFS is a 128-bit file system that provides 16 billion, billion times (yes you read that right) the capacity of 32-bit or even 64-bit file systems. 

Sun Open Storage 

Sun offers every component of open storage:  A tried-and-tested enterprise platform in OpenSolaris, the leading HPC file system Lustre, and the open source storage applications mentioned above.  Sun also offers a complete portfolio of innovative and efficient industry-standard servers and storage. 

Sun has, and will announce, storage systems built on an open storage platform as well - Sun Fire X4500 and Sun StorageTek 5800 are Sun's first products built on a truly open storage platform. 

Sun also offers open storage services and resources through its community :

• Learn how to build a Storage Server in 10 minutes or less here
• Build a simple NAS appliance using Sun Open Storage components here 

Sun Open Storage Customers

More compelling than anything I can write is what our customers say about Sun and open storage:

DigiTar
DigiTar provides advanced messaging security and processing services over the Internet.  They are using the opensolaris, Solaris ZFS and Sun Fire X4500's.  Jason Williams is DigiTar's COO/CTO and highlights his expereince with Sun open storage in his blogpost Democratizing Storage.  Even though the DigiTar team is self-described as “Linux zealots,” OpenSolaris was brought in because it made a superior storage platform.  Some of my favorite quotes are below:

“That’s the really amazing thing about OpenSolaris as a storage platform. It has all of the features of an expensive array and because it allows you to build reliable storage out of commodity components, you can build the storage architecture you need instead of being held hostage by the one you can afford.”

“When you’ve got rock-solid iSCSI, NFS, and I/O multipathing implementations, as well as a file system (ZFS) that loves cheap disks…and none of it requires licensing…you can suddenly do anything.  Need to handle 3600 non-cached IOPs for under $60K? No problem. Have an existing array but can’t justify $10K for snapshotting? No problem. How ‘bout serving line-rate iSCSI with commodity storage and CPUs? No problemo.” 

“By using X4500s, we get the same reliability and redundancy for about 85% less cost. That kind of savings means we can deploy 6.8x more storage for the same price footprint and do all sorts of cool things..."

Nexenta
Nexenta has built its NexentaOS and NexentaStor software appliance on Sun open storage products – OpenSolaris and ZFS.  This is significant, as the Nexenta team developed an iSCSI stack that was adopted by the Linux community.  Nexenta's team choose OpenSolaris for their storage platform to actually build a new NAS appliance.  Nexenta's NexentaStor offering is a software-based NAS and iSCSI solution - read about it here.  There is also an excellent blog on ZFS and Nexenta here.   

TACC 
Open Storage also has a large play in HPC - consider one of the world's largest supercomputer built from Sun's open storage, servers and traditional storage offerings.  TACC's Ranger system will be used in computational science & technology research.  Ranger runs 3,936 nodes and 62,976 processing cores; has 23TB of memory and 504TFlops at peak performance; and uses 1.73PB of shared disk and 31.4TB of local disk.  Ranger uses Lustre file system running across 72 Sun Fire X4500 servers. For long-term data retention and archive, Ranger runs Sun StorageTek SAM software over six metadata servers - and deploys five Sun StorageTek SL8500 libraries with 48 StorageTek T10000 tape drives.  Ranger will scale to over 3.1PB of online storage and 200PB of near-line storage. 

From a simple NAS appliance to one of the world's largest supercomputers - open storage scales!

You can read more user case studies below: 

• The University of Oxford is storing 19th century works with the ST5800
  
• Gracenote uses Sun Fire X4500's for its mobile music services
• Web 2.0 SaaS provider Sapotek says, "The ZFS file system feature of the Solaris 10 OS is a marvel. It creates a common storage pool where all storage performs as fast as if it were local. Our administrators can grow, add or remove storage on the fly in a single step. Just 2 people administer 24 terabytes.”
  

What about Sun's other Storage offerings? 

I invariably get this question when we highlight one architecture or approach.  So, to be clear - Sun sells closed systems too...and we sell a lot of them.  We now sell both depending on customer needs.  But we see the need for open storage - and we are investing in it while other vendors are not.  We are also investing in our traditional storage products - our customers deploy a mix of storage architectures depending on their needs - so Sun sells both.  Lastly, you can't claim breakthrough economics without leveraging tape in your portfolio.  If you want to hear about Sun's tape commitments, read about my trip down to Imation. 

But as far as open storage goes, I think Sun is on to something...

---- Updates ---- 

Other Open Storage Blogs: 

• Bob Porras says Open Storage IS the news...
• Lynn Rohrer's Community Perspective 
  
• Jeff interviews Sun Open Storage customers Nexenta and LiveAmmo

Posted at 07:19AM Apr 29, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[0]

Honeycomb is sticky sweet (and Open...)

In my last post I illustrated Sun's economic advantage with a system similar to the competition, but consuming 16% less power in 73% less space. (Built from the Sun Fire X4500)

I'm happy to post a recent InfoWorld product review on another Sun product, the ST5800 (aka Honeycomb).  Read it here: Sun's StorageTek Honeycomb is sticky and sweet

Open storage: One thing these two systems have in common is that they are truly "open" storage.  Now there are a lot of different meanings to the term open - so when I use it with storage I primarily think of two items: Industry standard hardware coupled with open source software.  (one could also add open standards to the term). 

Truly open storage systems like the products mentioned above are hitting the storage market.  And for good reason.   Open saves cost - from software licensing fees to the use of volume components.  Open is more flexible - developers can build applications directly in the system itself (which also allows a "product" to be re-built or re-purposed into another "product" as business needs change.)

Web applications: Open storage allows for mass customization as well as massive scalability at economics that make sense for today's "Web 2.0" applications. 

One of the most revealing analyst statistics I have read was from IDC's White Paper titled: The Expanding Digital Universe: A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2010.  In it, IDC predicts that 70% of the new digital data (988 exabytes) in the year 2010 will be created by individuals.  But 85% of this data will be managed by enterprises or organizations.   As I write this blog (content generated by me, stored and protected by Sun IT) Technorati cites 112.8 million blogs with 175,000 new blogs added every day...with 1.6 million new posts each day or 18 updates per second! 

Traditional closed storage architectures do well supporting a lot of enterprise IT applications (I  know because Sun sells them).  But new, more open architectures are needed to match the data growth rates and trends the market is currently seeing. 

And that's what Sun is building - and what Honeycomb is.  We launched our open source developer community for storage back in April.  We donated Honeycomb digital content (fixed archiving) code to this community last month.   And now InfoWorld has put this new open storage system to the test. 

Some Honeycomb Review Highlights: 
Honeycomb scored a 9.3 out of 10, with perfect 10s in Reliability and Scalability.  Here was the InfoWorld reviewer, Senior Analyst Mario Apicella's, bottom line:

"...Impressive resilience together with excellent performance and powerful administrative tools make “Honeycomb” one of the most interesting solutions in the emerging fixed-content archiving space. With a foot in the open source community, Honeycomb promises to deliver more software features faster than competing proprietary solutions, and customers that can’t wait have an easy and free alternative with a flexible SDK."

On Honeycomb's differentiation & open architecture:

"Sun has taken a different approach to companion software than vendors such as EMC, Hitachi, and HP, which have married their fixed-content archiving solutions to compliance applications...Sun has not wedded Honeycomb to any specific application, leaving that task to partners and customers. The upside of Honeycomb's openness is that the possibilities are endless. In fact, Honeycomb's powerful, built-in administrative software is complemented by an SDK that allows Java or C developers to define their own metadata schemas consistent with the specifics of their application."

On Honeycomb being a new breed of storage:

"Conventional NAS simply isn't designed for long-term archiving. The typical NAS would choke under the load of storing multiple large objects at the same time, and it would die with its third consecutive drive failure. Honeycomb addresses the performance and resilience requirements of content archiving with a new architecture. Unlike plain NAS solutions -- and fixed-content archiving solutions built on conventional storage systems (think EMC Centera) -- it's made for the job."

Expect more open storage products coming from Sun.  In this new Web 2.0/digital data world,  Sun storage (to quote Mario) will be "made for the job."

Posted at 01:58PM Mar 24, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[0]

Game-changing Storage Economics

In the open systems VTL space, EMC is the leader in market share.  (Sun leads in the Mainframe space btw).  How can Sun compete?  Answer - By changing the Economics at the infrastructure level.  See below: 

This is an example I use because both EMC and Sun (and IBM for that matter) use the same software - FalconStor. 

So, wouldn't you take a closer look at a product that offers similar functionality at 16% less power consumption in 73% less space? 

Posted at 08:12AM Mar 10, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[1]

Sun's Open Archive Announcement

If you've been walking the halls of Sun StorageTek of late, you would have heard a lot of talk about the "Archive Launch" and changing IT and storage economics...

Today, Sun made a large announcement in the Archive storage space.

First a word on messaging:  Internally, Sun Systems recently went through a healthy reality check on how we message our products and solutions.  We looked at where we are in the industry and where we can, and should, differentiate.  It's no secret that Sun's core assets reside at the infrastructure level - storage, servers, processors, O/S.  These segments are the backbone of IT infrastructure - on which applications are deployed to meet business requirements and goals.  We have come to a single conclusion in which today's (and tomorrow's) messaging will focus on - the Economics of IT needs to change.  With data sprawl, longer retention periods and a paradigm shift happening in how data is generated (more and more by individuals) - traditional IT infrastructures are becoming too expensive or too inflexible...

What we announced today:  So, you will hear an overall message of changing Economics through open IT architectures and infrastructures coming from Sun.  And you will hear us announce categories of the market in which we aim to change the economics in- today's happens to be archive.  What we announced:  

• Brand new product:  Sun StorageTek SL3000 Tape Library
  
• New product to existing family:  Sun StorageTek T9840D Tape Drives
  
• Product enhancements:  Sun Crypto Key Management System (KMS) 2.0 & Sun Customer Ready Infinite Archive System (aka Sun CIS)
• Open sourced digital archive: We donated the source code for the Sun StorageTek 5800 (aka HoneyComb)
  

Since I have personal experience with the SL3000 library and CIS - I'll paint some color on these products and their history :

Sun StorageTek SL3000 Tape Library:
10x the power savings and 50% footprint advantage vs. Quantum & IBM

How the SL3000 came to be was a Product Manager's dream:  A) We saw a gap in our tape portfolio between entry and enterprise libraries; B) we did extensive customer research and focus groups to get customer requirements; C) we flew customers in to see and comment on the prototype D) we announce it today.

No sloppy welds:  My team was fortunate enough to conduct the research for SL3000.  When we were in Asia focus groups, customers told us something that took us by surprise.  Our customers would actually look at the inside edges of a tape library to see how it was welded together.  If the weld was "sloppy" - put together hastily - they'd notice.  In a culture of quality - the little stuff is an indicator of overall quality.  Suffice to say, we've been poking our heads inside libraries looking for sloppy welds ever since.  A good indication on how customer feedback drove this product to market (and our quality focus at Sun StorageTek).  

Some quick stats on the library itself:

• SL3000 scales from around 200TB to 3PB (200 - 3,000 slots)
  
• Supports open and mainframe environments and mixed media
  
• Fully redundant robotics & non-disruptive capacity upgrades
  
• Up to 10x power savings and 50% footprint advantage vs. Quantum Scalar i2000 and IBM TS3500 (Economics!)
  

 Sun Customer Ready Infinite Archive System (aka CIS)
Costs 46% less and consumes 1/3 the power of a 2PB EMC Centera Solution

Skunk Works?  I just learned that the origin of the term "Skunk Works" came from Lockheed Martin when they were developing one of my favorite WWII fighter planes - the P-38 Lightning.  In tech, Skunk Works can have positive and negative connotations - I personally think a lot of innovation has come from working around the process, but you need a healthy balance.   Sun's X4500 (aka Thumper) came straight from engineering and by all measures its turning out to be a huge success.   I'm supporting a Skunk Works project in fact, and I'd love to see it get off the ground one of these days (perhaps more in a later blog, but its open source Systems Managed Storage software brought out of the mainframe world into open systems, available over SourceForge). 

So while SL3000 has its origins in traditional product management, CIS (er... "Customer Ready Infinite Archive System") got its origins more on the Skunk Works side of the house - from the Field Sales and Engineering side specifically.   I don't know the full story, but I am guessing it went something like this....a Sun systems engineer is at a customer site deploying a tiered storage architecture (disk, tape, server, HSM)  for the umpteenth time and thinks, "what if we did this integration BEFORE we shipped this to customers???"  And CIS was born (or something like that...)

Call it a tiered storage platform, or ILM-in-a box, or whatever - but this is what it is (and it can be used for more than just archive btw):

• Pre-configured and integrated
  
• Server, Disk & Tape in a single rack
• Sun X4200 or T5220 Server
• Sun StorageTek 2540 SAS or SATA disk
• Sun StorageTek SL500 Tape Library, supports LTO-4 tape drives
  
• Comes with HSM software (SAM) - fully automated backup and data migration
• Highly scalable - scales to petabytes by stringing multiple racks together under a single file system (QFS)
• Ready to run - just hook it up to the network - cool stuff...

So, since we are talking archive, we compared this integrated architecture to another popular archive appliance in the market.  In a 2PB configuration, Sun's Customer Ready Infinite Archive System costs 46% less and consumes 1/3 the power of a 2PB EMC Centera solution.  Additionally, data migration cost extra for Centera customers while it comes part of Sun's solution. 

So, the industry is looking at IT economics closer than it ever has before.  Sun is innovating here at the infrastructure level - adding functionality and performance while reducing cost through open source software, integrated systems, Eco-efficient hardware and leveraging the economics of tape...

---- Update ---

Other Sun blogs discussing Open Archive:

• Storage Stop
• Management Monogatari
• Bob Porras 
• QuickStick 
• Analyze This
• Georg's Weblog
• 数据管理
  

Posted at 01:48PM Feb 28, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[1]