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Wednesday Dec 20, 2006

Harnessing the Data Explosion

There's no question that today's file system products and storage trends will be unable to cope with the scale that is coming down the pipe in terms of network content. File systems are getting larger and larger and yet error rates are staying pretty much the same. And while errors occurring once in a billion or once in a trillion were okay in yesterday's world, with the explosion of content and bandwidth to serve that up, those errors are within the realm of normal operations today.

This edition of Innovating@Sun looks at how a new product/technology marriage addresses these issues, with host Hal Stern and guests Jeff Bonwick, distinguished engineer and CTO of storage products, Bill Moore, hardware and software architect, and Bob Sokol, chief technologist for the communications industry group.

Key discussion points include:

  • How superbly The Sun Fire X4500 (aka Thumper) and ZFS complement one another even though there were not developed in tandem
  • How ZFS needed a platform to showcase its ability to take a collection of unreliable components and make reliable storage, and how Thumper needed a robust file system that worked with commodity parts in order to serve a general-purpose market
  • Thumper has both compute and disk in the same box, interconnected in such a way that there's no bandwidth bottleneck
  • Customer reactions to Thumper and ZFS
  • Thumper as the cure to "SAN anger"
  • How Thumper is not only dense and space-efficient, but also cost-effective and power-efficient

    Links:



    Show Transcript
    Sun Fire X4500 Server
    ZFS, Sun's Cutting-Edge File System
    How a Small, Persistent Team Created a Revolutionary File System

    • Posted at 02:22PM Dec 20, 2006 by Laura Ventura in Sun [permalink] Comments [1]

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