Wednesday September 29, 2004

Heh, heh. Just when you thought I was going to give up on my Solaris 10 zone counting, you realize that I have just begun to fight! Consider it the lull before the storm.

Having run out of disk space on the Ultra 10, all hope seemed lost to hit triple digits. Alas, Scott McClure, one of our storage guru's, offered up his Sun StorEdge 6920. Here is a shot I couldn't resist taking.. That little 'ol U10 hooked up to a rack of storage. Gotta love it. Here is a transcript of the conversation Scott and I had (slightly embellished):

Scott: John, wanna use my StorEdge 6920 [Ed. Ok, he didn't say StorEdge, that's my marketing ]"
John: Scott, thanks! Yes!

Scott: OK, how much disk space?
John: How about 2 Terabytes?

Scott: Um, John, it's an Ultra 10. How many zones do you think you can hit?
John: Let me do the math, hold on ... Good point, I don't think I can hit 27,962 zones

Scott: OK, how about 100 gigabytes?
John: Let me do the math, hold on ... OK, that's 1365 zones. Hmmm. Mighty high bar to set. Don't want to intimidate the poor U10. How about 30-40GB? That's, hold on ... 546 zones at 40GB.

Scott: OK. How do you want the performance optimized? Sequential, random?
John: I dunno, is paging/swapping sequential or random? I'll be doing a lot of it when I move my swap file over to the 6920. Given the extra 4600 RPM's (not including the rotation of the earth), the 1GB of cache per tray, and the #of drives you will probably stripe over, I figure I can swap roughly 75x faster.

Scott: John, it's a U10
John: Paging out would be sequential I bet, but paging in would be fairly random. Then there's the actual zone creation ... Hey, Scott, can you make me two volumes, one tuned for random, one for sequential?

Scott: John. It's a U10.
John: Oh, yeah, that's right

Scott: I'll make it random.
John: OK, Scott, thanks for your support


Now, when I get a chance, I 'll actually create more zones. Gonna be a busy day.