Elektronkind

…and it sure doesn’t grant you instant vindication.

It appears that DaveM (Linux networking and SPARC port guru) has gotten seriously wound up in response to a blog post by Jeff Bonwick (Sun’s storage and kernel guru.)

As one can see in Jeff’s post, the suject he wrote about was within the greater context of using Solaris as a storage appliance OS (something I have an interest in) and why Solaris/OpenSolaris can and would excel when it comes to being the kernel of a storage OS.

I’m a storage guy. In the course of my work I have to not only work with Solaris hosts on my SAN, but also Windows and Linux (and soon, AIX). So I have a front-row seat when it comes to witnessing and dealing with how these various OSes deal with storage, from the filesystem to multipathing, to the HBA… and let me tell you, Linux is quite not the joy in this specific area as most people think it is on a general, all-encompassing level.

And that’s what Jeff’s angle was.

Now on to Dave’s rebuttle.

“The implication is that Linux is not rock-solid and that it does break and corrupt people’s data. Whereas on the other hand Solaris, unlike the rest of the software in this world, is without any bugs and therefore won’t ever break or corrupt your data.”

No OS comes without fault, but some OSes have faults that are more glaring than others in their analogous areas. Staying within the storage context of this discussion, I have to say, again, Linux is no shining star here.

ReiserFS is arguably the most advanced fs in terms of features when it comes to the portfolio of Linux file systems, but its issues with stability are such that you’re really walking on eggshells whenever you employ it. I have been personally told too many first-hand accounts and read plenty more on the Internets regarding its tendency to be fine and then fail spectacularly. It has been likened to a time-delayed /dev/null of sorts, and the future of it is in doubt with the legal troubles of its designer and Namesys limbo. Is any version of ReiserFS a viable Linux storage technology for a production environment? I say No. That’s sad because I dare say at one point ReiserFS had some promise.

EXT2 and 3… tried and true. Very stable and moderately fast for most tasks. But it’s an “old guard” file system. As such, it’s not very flexible, and any flexibility it gets comes from using a volume manager underneath of it. In the days where the notion of handing a server a 1TB LUN is nothing to blink at, this inflexibility can be suffocating in a dynamic environment. These “old guard” file systems (yes, Solaris’s UFS is one of them, too) are more like mere utility file systems than practical ones for today’s mass storage needs. It’s good for holding a machine’s OS and that’s about it.

XFS… Of all the file systems in the Linux file system portfolio, this one gets the gold star. Stable, fast, and decently scalable with the large amount of data you can stuff in it… but it still suffers the same problems EXT[23] and other “old guard” file systems do in terms of flexibility. In other words, it’s just a file system. Keep in mind that this critique is coming from a guy who worked with XFS on IRIX often and absolutely loved XLV… back in its the day.

As it stands now, the mainline Linux kernel doesn’t offer anything which embodies the file system triple play: being stable && fast && flexible. Solaris’s ZFS has this. I’ve so far entrusted 30TB of spinning rust to it, and it has yet to let me down. Sure, there are projects here and there that have the eventual goal endowing Linux with a ZFS analog, but as of right now they’re nothing production quality and are definitely not something a admin can call RedHat to get support for.

There are plenty of other aspects to the storage context… the fibre channel stack, for one, and other things such as multipath IO implementations and volume manager and management layers (which Linux has a host of… not necessarily a good thing… LVM, LVM2, MPIO, RDAC… it makes your head spin.)

But as far as this storage-oriented discussion goes, file systems are indeed the make or break aspect. This is why Jeff said what he said. Linux has no ZFS. Windows has no ZFS. It is not that Linux or Windows need ZFS itself in order to compete, it’s that they need to develop and employ the concepts that ZFS implements and do so as clearly and concisely as ZFS has.

Anyway, enough about storage. Now, why is it that the Linux community (let alone a prominent member of it) has to react so violently to any questioning of its perceived superiority? Is it misplaced or excess pride? Have they not tried things other than Linux recently and they’re just flying with blinders on? Is it just the social culture which prevails within it? What ever it is, seeing posts like Dave’s makes my toes curl with embarrassed amazement.

A friendly message to Dave: Chill the ad hominems, mkay? Crying “FUD!” at the mere sight of someone who you perceive as poo-poo’ing an aspect of your interest doen’t typically translate into a well thought-out rebuttle. You took the low road and tried to convey Jeff as being some instrument of some nefarious, Mr. Burns-like person at Sun. Is vilifying instead of cool-headed technical discourse really your desired style? Has anyone come biting at you saying “oh, he’s a Linux kernel developer, so he has an agenda”?

Technorati Tags: linux, solaris, opensolaris, storage, fud, zfs, fuzzy bunnies

Earlier this month I spewed some vitriol over an unpleasant discovery regarding the Sun StorageTek 6140 array and its underwhelming out-of-the-box feature set (which, three weeks later, remains an unresolved issue even after contacting and working with my VAR, Sun sales rep-proper, and two Sun SEs. Sigh) (NOTE: As of 8 Feb this issue has been resolved). This whole issue was over the sneaky renaming of a feature commonly known as LUN Masking and charging beaucoup bucks for it as a license-activated addon.

Well, I want to write some more about this with an industry-wide perspective because as of this past Thursday, Apple is now playing a similar game regarding their Xserve RAID systems. With the release of RAID Admin Tools 1.5.1 and associated firmware, Apple has removed LUN Masking as a feature of the Xserve RAID. Yep. Removed it. In a minor version release of the software, no less. Absolutely astonishing.

So, with the Sun StorageTek 6140 and its crippled features (unless you fork over $10+ mega bucks for a Storage Domains license pack of adquate seat count) and Apple rather brashly removing LUN Masking for no real stated reason and, to top it off, without warning, where does this leave us? And what of the (otherwise reputable) mid-range storage vendors who are left (HP? IBM?); who’s to say they won’t pull a similar stunt down the line?

Well, I know IBM is out of the picture for me as they OEM the same LSI Engenio system that Sun uses for the 6140. Yep, both IBM and Sun sell the exact same system, only IBM calls it the DS4700 Express and Sun calls their version the StorageTek 6140. Their only appreciable difference is one comes in IBM Black and the other in Sun Silver. You also have to buy the IBM equivalent of the 6140’s Storage Domains, which IBM calls “Partitions”. Talk about a screwed up sense of storage terminology.

Anyway, that pretty much leaves HP, and I’m petty unfamiliar with their product line or prices. I don’t even know if I can even get HP kit since I’m not aware of any current State of Maryland purchasing contract with them for this sort of stuff.

So what’s with this apparent vendor hate of LUN Masking in mid-range systems, anyway? One either has to pay out the nose to have it (regarding Sun and IBM) or it’s there but disappears into the night (Apple). Crikey. Whoever does product planning at Engenio, Sun, IBM, and Apple needs a serious reality check. For us people where mid-range is high-end, this behavior matters quite a bit. It just seems like feature sets are imploding rather than expanding, removing a distinct competitive advantage from these products.

Technorati Tags: sun, ibm, engenio, lsi, apple, solaris, storage

Sun and Intel announced a new partnership between the two companies today, with both CEOs presenting at a news conference this morning.

Sun hasn’t had a Intel CPU in its product line since Sun discontinued its Pentium 4-based V60z server several years ago when the company was teething its new x86 product line. This product line eventually developed into the exclusively AMD Opteron-based servers we have today. Intel/Xeon was out, AMD/Opteron was in. With today’s announcement, both Intel and AMD will now share Sun’s x86 product portfolio.

I’ve noticed that reaction to this news has been mixed, with some saying it’s good, and others saying “WTF, mate?”. Sun’s Opteron-based Galaxy servers are top-notch, so this has lots of people utterly surprised… like having a great night out with someone and then being dumped on the doorstep.

Well, it’s surprising news to say the least. As I thought about it more, though, it isn’t bad at all for Sun, and really isn’t all that forboding for AMD. In exchange for a Intel-based product line, Intel will seriously push Solaris for Sun. That is exquisitely good news. Sun now has a product line which can serve both AMD and Intel customer preferences.

Think of that “iPod Halo Effect”. Sun doesn’t have to turn away customers who want Intel CPUs now, and with Intel pushing Solaris, hopefully more applications and thus more Solaris installations will be in customers’ data centers. I dare say that those customer will like Solaris, and perhaps look to buy (more) Sun servers.

Besides, Sun isn’t the only company to straddle the divide between AMD and Intel. Dell, a traditionally staunch Intel ally, added Opteron servers to its product line last year, as did IBM. HP has offered systems with CPUs from both companies for at least 1.5 years, if not longer.

It’s a move that makes sense, especially for Sun, and that in itself something we should applaud… moves that make sense (duh!)

Technorati Tags: sun, intel, amd, solaris

It’s not often that I’m so utterly disappointed by a product that I feel the need to write about my experience with it, but a situation at work with two newly-arrived Sun StorageTek 6140 disk arrays has cetrainly enraged me enough, and boy do I feel the need to rail against vendors who cripple their products on purpose.

NOTE: As of 8 Feb this issue has been resolved, but read on if you want to head about the saga.
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Sun released the third maintenance update for Solaris 10 yesterday. The What’s New documentation covers all the features it adds to Solaris 10. There’s so much Good Stuff in this update that’s it really should be called “Solaris 10.5″. The ones most exciting and immediately useful to me:

• Storage Networking Industry Association Multipath Management API Support

  Basically, this adds the ability to manage Solaris’s fibre channel multipathing without having to manually edit /kernel/drv/scsi_vhci.conf and rebooting. It’ll also present you with clear status on multipath’d links without having to piece together lines from syslog. See the new mpathadm(1m) command.

• Logical Domains (LDoms) 1.0 Software

  Logical hardware partitions for sun4v-based servers! This means you can now take advantage of the hardware hypervisor on your Sun Fire T1000 or T2000 to carve it up into up 32 independent logical domains, each running their own OS instance.

• Recursive ZFS snapshots, Double Parity RAID-Z (raidz2), Hot-spares for ZFS storage pool devices

  Recursive ZFS snapshots is a godsend to those (like me) who have many nested ZFS file systems. One command will now snapshot them all, rather than having to explicitely snapshot each one individually. DP RAID-Z (raidz2) is another feature comperable to what’s known as “RAID 6″, and of course hot spare device support, the usefulness of which is self-evident.

Technorati Tags: Sun, Solaris

Here’s something that should be dear to any storage manager’s heart: the 50th birthday of the hard drive. CNet has posted a silent video of IBM’s first hard drive which held a total of 5MB of data. IBM announced this new technology on September 13, 1956.

Click here to view it. (Warning: a short ad precedes it)

Technorati Tags: storage, hard drives

The primary server for my home on the ‘net, elemental.org, lithium.elemental.org (a venerable Sun Ultra 2 running Solaris 8) has been upgraded to two 400Mhz UltraSPARC-II CPUs with 2MB of L2 cache each.

In the coming months lithium will be replaced with a new server. Most likely this’ll be in the form of a HP ProLiant DL145 G2 with two 500GB SATA drives and dual 2.2Ghz AMD Opterons running Solaris 10.

After 5 years of being a Macintosh user and owner, I purchesed the parts to make my own x86 system. I did it to play the odd Windows-only game (CoD2 and the upcoming Spore) as well as for working on OpenSolaris.

It’s a Athlon64 3200 CPU, 1GB of Corsair RAM, and a GeForce 6600 on a Asus A8N-VM CSM motherboard in a mico-ATX package (case by Antec).

So far I’ve enjoyed it. It compiled Solaris Nevada build 34 in 2 hours, 7 minutes and plays CoD2 really well on my 20″ Apple Cinema Display.

 Here’s some system detail courtesy of CPU-Z:

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A few weeks ago, I finally got fed up enough with my slow and buggy Nokia 6600 phone and took advantage of T-Mobile’s 2-year plan renewal discount on the Motorola RAZR V3 phone. If you know me, you know that I despised flip phones for their tendancy to break faster, but I have to say, I’m now a convert.

The cheesy “Hello Moto” stuff aside, the RAZR V3 is a nice little piece of gadgetry. The menus respond fast to key presses, they’re layed out well with a clear font to boot, the thing is damn thin (no more “is that a Nokia brick in your pocket or are you happy to see me?”) and the overall feature set is sure to please many a tech geek. My only qualm with it is that it is unable (as of this writing) to support my favorite phone app, Salling Clicker. Plus, the thing is quad-band GSM, which means it definitely will work most anywhere (such as in Turkey, where I will be going in March).

I finally went out and bought a flatbed scanner today. The model I got is a Canon LiDE 500F, a fairly recent one which includes a 35mm film scanner and was a pretty decent deal, clocking in at $129 at the local CompUSA.

The main impetus behind buying this is to start scanning and archiving the cover art of my ~900 music CDs, but since this came with a film scanner, I’m now scanning in the 35mm negatives from my trip to Ireland with Jacki back in August of 1999. See, even though I took the pictures, Jacki ended up with the prints and I got the negatives and I haven’t seen much of those prints, ever… so now I’ll get to see these pictures I took thanks to this nifty scanner from Canon.

Oh, and it likes MacOS X 10.4, too.