Paisit Blog

Since Sun Storage 7000 have been launched in Asia South (Jan/09), it created a lot of interests as well as generate questions around this disruptive product despite the economic recession.Thanks to the innovation (hybrid storage, leverage opensource, analytic, commodity hardware) that totally change the storage design and bring the cost down significantly. The innovation in S7000 came at the right time to rescue us to continue the business with less cost while data still grow.

To make it simple for everyone as onestop shopping for S7000 information, this section of my blog will share you about FAQ i.e., success story, performance number, how to setup simulator and other knowledge i.e., whitepaper, video, trick & tip, blogs.

This blog is two ways communication and will be updated regularly. Feel free to comment or ask any questions if you have any, I will response to your query via this blog.

Success Story

1. Smugmug (internet photo sharing). They choosed Sun Storage 7410 for Web 2.0 operation. They came to present how their new storage perform at Open Storage Summit 2008 event. See slide. In short, "SSD is real (new way to improve performance rather than just add drive), Crazy fast (microsecond response time), Analytic is dream, Good Price tag, God-like power,etc"

2. iWeb (web hosting) recently deploy 7410 in their environment to run email application and hosting application. See more detail from their blog at  here

More to come when more customer allow us to share their success.

S7000 Review

1. Infoworld (Testing Center) have given review rating to Sun Storage 7210 with 9.2 points from 10 (excellent). Find out the detail from here. Below is their quote

"Sun's investment in ZFS continues to pay dividends, enabling the creation of compelling products such as the 7210 unified storage system. A thoroughly heavyweight filer in a small form factor, the 7210 packs as much as 44TB of surprisingly fast and affordable storage in a single 4U chassis. The Web-based GUI is fantastic, and performance is stellar. It's just about everything you could want in a storage server."

2. PC Pro from UK have rated Sun Storage 7110 with 6 stars!!. Find out why, please visit here. Below is their quote

"7110 is the storage host with the most since it offers NAS and IP SAN support - all as standard" and "The 7110 delivers a complete network storage solution with no hidden catches. Both NAS and IP SAN are supported, performance is very good, and Sun won't be beaten on value."

3. Computer World (Australia). See published here. Their quote is

"The Sun Storage 7210 Unified Storage System isn't cheap, but the cost is actually fairly low considering the capabilities. Make no mistake, none of this capability would be possible without ZFS; no other file system available today can make use of the resources present in the 7210 like ZFS, and the addition of the solid-state logging drive just increases the potency of this file system."

4. ILM - Informatique (France) have reviewd Sun Storage 7110. Below is their quote.

"The Sun Storage 7110 Unified Storage System makes it easier than ever to simplify your storage for less. The easy-to-use appliance is ideal for enterprise workgroups, remote offices or SMBs, and offers enterprise storage at entry-level prices". See full review at here.

5. Open SRS (blog) have tested our performance v.s. NetApps. See detail. Their quote is

"I’ll close with a reiteration of my opening:  I’m really impressed with this platform.  Sun’s done an amazing job, and the Open Storage platform is going to shake the (largely ridiculously overpriced) enterprise storage market to its core. Keep up the great work!"

Performance, Performance and Performance

Many people is asking about this. The performance is depend on various factor such as workload type (random, sequential, ratio of read/write, %cache hit,etc), test configuration (how many HDD, SSD, CPU, RAID), where is the data (DRAM, SSD, HDD), network environment (Gigabit, FastEthernet,etc). And it's challenge to test all of combination.

Table below contains some of testing result by Sun engineer (FishWork) team as well as some of field engineer. Please do read the detail from blogs to understand the assumption, environment, configuraiton we have tested since those will be different from your environment whereby you want to compare

Workload	Protocol/Platform	Model	Performance	Detail
Random Read	NFS/Unix	7410	281,000 IOPS from DRAM	Detaill
Sequential Read	NFS/Unix	7410	1.90GB/s from DRAM	Detail
Sequential Read	NFS/Unix	7410	1.04GB/s from HDD	Detail
Sequential Write	NFS Unix	7410	563MB/s to HDD	Detail
Sequential Read	CIFS/Windows	7410	1.03GB from DRAM	Detail
Sequential Read	CIFS/Windows	7410	849MB/s from HDD	Detail
Sequential Write	CIFS/Windows	7410	620MB/s to HDD	Detail
Random Read	CIFS/Windows	7410	203,000 IOPS from DRAM	Detail
Video Streaming	NFS/Unix	7210	752MB/s from HDD	Detail
Sequential Read	N/A	7110	248MB/s from HDD (RAID1)	Detail
Sequential Write	N/A	7110	196MB/s to HDD (RAID1)	Detail

More testing result will be posted here when we have new data. 

Knowledge

Technical White paper of S7000, check here

Learn how to use Analytic in detail in S7000 from here

Get S7000 Simulator and run it on your notebook click here , to get instruction how to setup, click here

Quick Interactive Demo on how to manage S7000: Here

A lot lot of good video of S7000 (install, provisioning, dashboard, analytic, replication, share data): Here