Day 2 of the Storage Academy was all about learning in break out sessions. There were eight session happening in parallel. The choice of session turned out to be an difficult task. There was so much great material to be explored that I had a hard time picking the one that I thought was right for me. Then, I recalled my guiding principle : “pick the topics that you know least about”.
With that in mind, I first picked Christian Bandulet's presentation labeled “Understanding Object Storage”. What a great choice that was. I only had a rough idea what Object Storage was though my exposure to Honeycomb (aka Sun Storagetek 5800), and the freely available Honeycomb emulator, but I definitely lacked context here. Christian corrected this in a presentation that managed to mix theory and implementation of CAS (content aware storage) well.
My big takeaway from this session : the world's data consists of mainly unstructured, fixed content (use Email as an example), which would be better stored in objects that managed the data and its meta-data and has capability to easily store and retrieve object autonomously in a flat hierarchy. By doing so, we can build storage that can behave intelligently. For example, instead of asking a disk array to retrieve a block, we can now query storage for all the Xray images of patients which early signs of breast cancer who lived in the New Hampshire since 2005 and where incorrectly diagnosed. And by the way, we want this images to be converted into JPG format on the fly.
Next up was my dear friend Tim Thomas' presentation aptly named “Storage ISV Solutions for Sun's Breakthrough Storage Products”. I leave my report blank here in the hope Tim will blog about his presentation himself. He said he would (or was it the we said he should :-). Anyway, watch Tim's blog here.
In the spirit of learning about technology I know little about, I attended a session on performance tuning of Sun storage library, the SL8500. Jacques Villain and Steve Johnson talked us through the recent performance improvements of the SL8500 in comparison with the 9310 (aka Powderhorn). Jacques talked us through how the SL8500 can be partitioned. I guess virtualization has made its entrance into the tape library world as well. I have to say, high-end enterprise tape library technology for me is a world on his own. Beware here, never make the mistake to assume that tape libraries are at the opposite spectrum of bleeding edge. Tape is still the most cost-effective long-term storage medium. But cost is just one dimension. More and more compliance laws are being released that force enterprises to keep more and more data for longer and longer periods of time. And when it comes to capacity (the SL8500 can hold up to 2,048 tape drives) and reliability (2,000,000 mean exchanges/swaps between failure per HandBot), the SL8500 is a formidable force. The sheer engineering competence needed to design a device like the SL8500 is mind-boggling.
I ended the day listening to Peter Brouwer's presentation on Sun's Common Array Manager (CAM). The learning I took away from this presentation is that CAM is the single place to manage all Sun storage disk devices easily and efficiently. I also learned that CAM has a “profile” feature which allows the storage to be pre-configured for a specific workload. Imagine you have an OLTP type of workload with on Oracle database. Just select “Oracle_OLTP”, and CAM will configure RAID level 1, segment size of 512KB, and enable read ahead. Don't like what CAM chose ? Just clone the profile, change it and store the profile under your own name. Of course, now you can apply your profile to all other arrays. Easy.
The evening event was a dinner for all attendees of the Storage academy. I sat with a group of Sun reseller partners and Sun employees from Denmark. These guys know how to have fun. That's all I can say :-)
To bed at 1am. I am very tired. Can't wait for day 3.