Our friends over at Corporate Technologies have compiled a useful FAQ on the Sun Storage 7000 series. If you have questions, it's a good place to start so take a look.

It's been a few of months since the last blog roundup from the Fishworks team, and there have been quite a number of interesting posts.

Bryan has been hard at work excoriating the SPEC SFS benchmark and chastizing its would-be supporters (with a brief diversion to marvel at the similarities between the Fishworks business plan and that of NetApp from its inception).

Dave has written a great post on fault management and alerts in the Sun Storage 7000 series. He also recently highlighted one of the great, unsung features of the 7000 series: built-in, free, flexible compression that can in fact improve system performance.

Adam wrote the very useful space calculator for the Sun Storage 7410. This uses a 7000 series system to calculate the delivered capacity of a 7410 configuration. Conveniently, you can use this with the Sun Storage 7000 Simulator — a fully-featured VM version of the 7000 series whose use and genesis Adam also wrote about in detail. He spoke at the OpenSolaris Storage Summit about the Hybrid Storage Pool and ZFS and at the WISH conference about the failings of SSDs today. Taking the lead from bloggers at EMC and NetApp, Adam wrote about the flexibility of the Hybrid Storage Pool, discussed its origin, and commented on the announcement of some SSDs designed for the HSP.

Brendan, the ever prolific performance profiler, has written and continues to write an amazing series on the performance of the Sun Storage 7000 series:

• Unusual disk latency a.k.a. Shouting at JBODs
• My Sun Storage 7410 perf limits a roundup of various benchmarks
• L2ARC Screenshots
• DRAM latency
• Networking Analytics Example
• CIFS at 1 Gbyte/sec
• Latency Art: Rainbow Pterodactyl
• Heat Map Analytics

Stay tuned for more from the Fishworks team!

So the video of Brendan shouting at JBODs was picked up by reddit, digg, Slashdot and others, and has now been seen by a whopping quarter of a million people -- which appears to make it the most watched video ever made by Sun. (Whoever thought that Sun's most public face would be Brendan hollering into storage gear?) Of the folks picking up the story, most simply linked to it -- but there were a couple of stories of note:

• Greg at rejectreality has some in-depth analysis -- and an interesting suggestion for a follow-on experiment.

• Robin Harris -- a.k.a. StorageMojo -- draws similar conclusions, and adds a concise summary of the promise of Fishworks and the challenge it presents for Sun:

  Fishworks is the kind of great technology that has always been at the root of Sun’s appeal. Translating that appeal into sales is Sun’s marketing challenge.

• ITavisen, a Norwegian IT publication, was among the first to pick up on the video, writing a lengthy piece that ends with the sage advice:

  Men for sikkerhets skyld er det det kanskje best å snakke dempet så lenge det er en harddisk i rommet - akkurat som med småbarn...

  This translates roughly as:

  Just to be sure, it's probably best to speak softly as long as there's a hard disk in the room -- just as with small children...

  Though it seems likely that a video of Brendan hollering at small children and observing the resulting increase in latency would get far more than a mere quarter million hits on YouTube...

Finally, it should be noted that the story was picked up by engadget, not for the post itself, but for this priceless comment:

    Mary! @ Jan 2nd 2009 2:03PM
    Mmm, that Brendan's one sexy cub.

To which there was the (accurate) response:

    Marcela @ Jan 2nd 2009 2:41PM
    I'll have to agree girls, he is cute...too bad he is insane... 
    or at least..really really weird. 

Some recent blog links relating to Fishworks:

• Brendan showed a Sun Storage 7410 reaching about 2 Gbytes/sec for a DRAM cached read NFS workload, and showed that this may not even be the limit.
• An Analytics usage example was posted, showing why JBOD I/O latency can be useful to check.
• Brendan and Bryan have posted a video of some bizarre disk I/O latency.
• Kevin Burton, founder/CEO of Spinn3r has posted his thoughts on Fishworks, SSD, flash and high density storage.

Will Snow from sun.com has a few of our boxes, and has some simple examples of how to script the CLI. Ho ho ho!

A couple of cool blog posts from team Fishworks today:

• Cindi has captured the Fishworks project as a visualized Code Swarm. Check out her blog for all the details.
• Adam has written a lengthy post on the virtues of the Hybrid Storage Pool using flash as a cache as contrasted with the use of flash as a replacement for hard drives.
• Late Addition: Brendan has posted some remarkable performance numbers and provides some useful pointers when evaluating performance.

Also of note is a blog post from Gene Ruth at the Burton Group:

Turns out Sun uses SSDs tailored both for write performance to handle an internal logging function and then read optimized SSD to act essentially as a really large cache. All wrapped around their open-source ZFS file system hidden within the storage subsystem. Sun is demonstrating technology leadership by tightly integrating SSD technology into a complete storage subsystem - yes others have done a pluggable replacement for a HDD, but that's fairly obvious and less then optimal.

While you can keep up with the feed of fishworks-tagged blogs, here are some recent posts by Fishworks engineers that you may have missed:

• Greg talks about SAS, SATA, and JBODs all work together. And to anyone who thinks it's easy to "roll your own" cluster with SATA disks in a SAS JBOD, be sure to sit down with Greg (and Keith) for an enlightening/mind-numbing discussion about SATA affiliations.
• Dave shows just how easy it is to add Analytics infrastructure to arbitrary applications by demonstrating HTTP/WebDAV analytics.
• In his continuing quest for sympathy over the difficulty of lighting an LED (often called the "last problem" in computer science), Eric describes the final pieces needed to provide a coherent user experience for managing disks and faults.
• Bill discusses the design and features of managing administrative users on the appliance, though he leaves on a cliff hanger - the true power of role-based access control (predicted to be a ratings monster) is put off until the next entry.
• While venting his frustration over the Perl's resemblance to "a reeking metropolis like Lagos or Nairobi", Bryan provides insight into the history and power of the CLI.
• While mentioned in the previous entry, Adam flexes his python skills and provides a tool for calculating storage capacity for various 7410 configurations.

In case you missed it, be sure to check out Mike's RAS whitepaper that describes a smorgasbord of features that keep your data safe and you informed about all the problems (or hopefully lack thereof) on all Sun Storage 7000 systems.

There's been a lot of buzz about the Fishworks-based Sun Storage 7000 series this week. Some reviews or thoughts you might have missed:

• InfoWorld's Paul Venezia has a pre-review of the Sun 7000 series, in which he wins our affection forever by answering our many Simpsons references with one of his own.
• Paul Murphy on storage analytics, which he praises as "the first real time command and control package I’ve seen that meets the information presentation criteria taught by Edward Tufte." High praise indeed -- thank you!
• Clayton on an upcoming close evaluation of Fishworks. Regardless of Clayton's decision, hopefully we'll see some details of the evaluation!
• Andy Leonard with a Fishworks configuration walkthrough using the virtual appliance. Andy's walkthrough is complete with screenshots, and to answer one question that he raised: the "Reserved" wedge on the storage configuration pie is not meant to be a jab at any competitors -- that was just a bonus. ;)
• Joerg Moellenkamp with another Fishworks initial configuration walkthrough using the VMware image. Joerg's walkthrough is also laden with screenshots, and in particular, Joerg has taken a screenshot of every step in the config. Yes, it's that easy!

Some long-time friends-of-Fishworks also posted their thoughts on the new product. While we count them as friends, they are each fiercely independent thinkers -- so you should not discount any praise. ;)

• Stephen O'Grady provides his analysis on the Fishworks-based appliances. As always, Stephen's analysis is thoughtful and thorough -- and of particular note because Stephen is not a storage analyst. To answer one question that Stephen raises: while we all enthusiastically embraced the idea (and pitched in to make it happen), the idea of providing a VMware image is due to Adam.
• Ted Leung recounts a visit to Fishworks HQ -- and then proceeds to fight off some bozo in the comments who accused him of astroturfing for Sun.
• Tim Bray provides his thoughts on our launch. Like Stephen and Ted, Tim has been following our project for quite some time -- and we hope that the positive tone of Tim's post means that we've been forgiven for using XML-RPC. ;)

In addition to the launch at CEC, we did several presentations on the new Sun Storage 7000 product line:

• Fishworks Overview
• Analytics
• Clustering
• Hybrid Storage Pools
• Troubleshooting
• ZFS

These presentations are designed for the CEC audience, and are not intended for general customer use. Many of them were accompanied by demos and discussions, but hopefully the slides themselves will be of interest to some.

A few more blogs on the Sun Storage 7000 Series:

• Eric Schrock on storage configuration
• Josh Simons sharing his experiences with the VM image
• BM Seer collecting performance data