Comments on: OpenSolaris 2008.11 - A Preview For The Storage Admin

By: Links for 1 Jul 2008 - 30 Jul 2008 :: Col’s Tech Stuff

Links for 1 Jul 2008 - 30 Jul 2008 :: Col’s Tech Stuff — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 09:03:10 +0000

[...] OpenSolaris 2008.11 - A Preview For The Storage Admin - A great review of the features you can find in OpenSolaris 2008.11 from a Storage perspective, ie the stuff sysadmins want, but the other reviews never mention. [...]

By: Mike Selway

Mike Selway — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:11:39 +0000

Just a note on the reference related to SAM-QFS… The author references that SAM (HSM/ILM aspect) “sits on top of QFS”. Technically this is not correct. Unlike all other HSM type products, e.g., DMF, StorNext, ADM (work in progress) with ZFS, the SAM functions and features are fully integrated WITHIN the file system structure of QFS. The choice to use SAM with QFS is a feature-driven decision, not a product level one. Only SAM-QFS allows all metadata about the file (Unix and HSM-type) to be fully stored in the inode of the file. All other systems use the more communication intensive approach of a file system linking to HSM executables via API calls (often set as DMAPI). The SAM-QFS approach also allows the system to provide all relevant file metadata (Unix and HSM file copy status/location, etc.) in a single 512-byte inode “open/read” whereas the other HSM approaches normally require much more communication between file system and HSM with database lookups and queries to gain that same information.

By: OSCron

OSCron — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 17:06:56 +0000

A review of OpenSolaris for the Storage Admin…

A recent review of the Indiana 2008.05 release from the storage admin’s perspective. Interesting storage/file system tidbits there….

By: Dale Ghent

Dale Ghent — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:54:36 +0000

@foobar - Qlogic open sourced the Solaris qlc (standard HBA initiator driver for the 23xx and 24xx cards) and the qlt driver as well (for target mode on the 24xx HBAs) -

http://src.opensolaris.org/source/xref/nwsc/src/sun_nws/qlc/src/
http://src.opensolaris.org/source/xref/nwsc/src/sun_nws/comstar/port_providers/qlt/src/

I didn’t catch that SAS news! Thanks for pointing that out!

By: foobar

foobar — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:09:41 +0000

@rocky, AFAIK, Qlogic owns and writes the drivers (so you won’t find it in opensolaris)

By: foobar

foobar — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:03:55 +0000

SAS support is coming to COMSTAR
http://blogs.sun.com/dhollister/entry/comstar_sas_port_provider_coming
so a solaris box will be able to serve as a block device over a eSATA cable as well :D
and while it’s 3Gb vs 4Gb for FC, the LSI 1068 is still cheaper than the QLC FC cards

By: mike

mike — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 21:41:11 +0000

Could I install OSOL right now and guarantee forward compatibility with all these new ZFS features and the new CIFS stuff?

I want to take advantage of them, but I don’t want to install OSOL now and be SOL when the time comes to upgrade. I assume you can, but perhaps the internal ZFS format will change and it will be only backwards compatible?

Also - do you have any good recommendations for 6-8 drive chassis that will be quiet so I can throw 8x 1TB disks in it and use it for ZFS/home storage/daily snapshots of my remote servers I administer?

Thanks a ton. I’m getting more excited and I’m contemplating attempting to run OSOL now, I’ve always been a Linux guy and a small amount of FreeBSD…

By: thinking sysadmin » Blog Archive » Link Dump, 7/17/2008

thinking sysadmin » Blog Archive » Link Dump, 7/17/2008 — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 19:50:47 +0000

[...] Elektronkind: OpenSolaris 2008.11 - A Preview For The Storage Admin - A look at upcoming storage technologies in OpenSolaris 2008.11, including ZFS, iSCSI, NDMP, COMSTAR, AVS and SAM-QFS. These products really set OpenSolaris apart from Linux distributions, although I wonder how official this list is, and have some doubts about the status of some of the projects. For example, there doesn’t appear to be much activity on the SAM-QFS OpenSolaris project, although maybe I’m just looking in the wrong place. (Seen at c0t0d0s0.org.) [...]

By: Dale Ghent

Dale Ghent — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:59:06 +0000

@Peter Griffen

The ahci driver supports Intel ICH6/7/8/9, VIA vt8251 and JMicron AHCI controllers (per its man page) and according to Intel’s documents, your mobo has the ICH8 controller, so the ahci driver in theory *should* be attaching to it.

Are you using a RAID mode on it, perchance? If you have any error strings, or is your machine booting from it but is using the disks in IDE compat mode?

By: Dale Ghent

Dale Ghent — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:53:07 +0000

@rocky

The information I’m going off of is from Qlogic themselves, posted to the OpenSolaris storage-discuss forum here:

http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/storage-discuss/2008-July/005819.html

and

http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/storage-discuss/2008-July/005826.html