Managing Storage Resources
The hybrid nature of the storage system leverages the pool of Flash/SSD, DRAM, and SATA drives. The Solid-State Drive (SSD) enables a rapid access of the data and is often used to accelerate performance of random reads or writes. Amber Road comes with the ZFS file system, which automatically manages the data placement. The frequently-used data are placed to SSDs, while less-frequently used data would be placed to HDDs.
Administering Application Behavior
The storage system comes with the free web base management tool that allows users to configure and analyze real time behavior of the application. Users can troubleshoot many common issues such as which file takes longest to access or what is the read vs write ratio of the application. Since the Analyzer is based on DTrace, it shows real time performance statistics of the running application.
To
start with Amber Road, you can download the simulator as a VirtualBox
or VMWare iamge, depending on your preference, and configure to see
what it can do for you. I've downloaded a copy on my iMac and took a
few snapshots while accessing an .iso file to generate a simple workload.
You can drill into the statistics of individual operations, such as read or write, by client, or file name. See the details of the file accessed on the left hand side, aside from the main graph.
Finally, I've got a few questions on the setup of the simulator. Here are some resources that you may find useful for that and general Amber Road reviews:
A Walkthrough to the Sun Storage Simulator Part 1
Review: Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System – Part II
The SSE members get special discount on the system, so check it out.