zfs discuss - Feb 2010 - verging OT: how to buy J4500 w/o overpriced drives

+------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| On 2010-02-01 23:01:33, Tim Cook wrote:
| 
| On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 10:58 PM, matthew patton <pattonme at yahoo.com>
wrote:
| 
| > what with the home NAS conversations, what''s the trick to buy a
J4500
| > without any drives? SUN like every other "enterprise" storage
vendor thinks
| > it''s ok to rape their customers and I for one, am not interested
in paying
| > 10x for a silly SATA hard drive.
| 
| Good luck.  Unless you find a third party to buy drive sled''s from,
you''re
| buying them from s/Sun/Oracle.

http://www.memoryx.net/5410456.html

I''ve bought sleds for X4150s and X2270s from them.

Cheers.
-- 
bda
cyberpunk is dead. long live cyberpunk.

what with the home NAS conversations, what''s the trick to buy a J4500
without any drives? SUN like every other "enterprise" storage vendor
thinks it''s ok to rape their customers and I for one, am not interested
in paying 10x for a silly SATA hard drive.

On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 10:58 PM, matthew patton <pattonme at yahoo.com>
wrote:
> what with the home NAS conversations, what''s the trick to buy a
J4500
> without any drives? SUN like every other "enterprise" storage
vendor thinks
> it''s ok to rape their customers and I for one, am not interested
in paying
> 10x for a silly SATA hard drive.
>
>
>
Good luck.  Unless you find a third party to buy drive sled''s from,
you''re
buying them from s/Sun/Oracle.

--Tim
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
<http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20100201/a68dc202/attachment.html>

> http://www.memoryx.net/5410456.html
>
> I''ve bought sleds for X4150s and X2270s from them.
interesting mis-description on the web page.  thumper doesn''t use SCA
drives.

-frank

On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 11:58 PM, matthew patton <pattonme at yahoo.com>
wrote:
> what with the home NAS conversations, what''s the trick to buy a
J4500
> without any drives? SUN like every other "enterprise" storage
vendor thinks
> it''s ok to rape their customers and I for one, am not interested
in paying
> 10x for a silly SATA hard drive.
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> zfs-discuss mailing list
> zfs-discuss at opensolaris.org
> http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
>
I think this is a pretty insane thing to say.  First of all, sun
doesn''t
sell home NAS equipment. Second of all, I''m not going to pretend sun
doesn''t
charge a premium for their products but they ARE a enterprise vendor.  You
wouldn''t say something like "hey, where can i buy a Ferrari
without any
wheels...i''m not paying x amount for a silly aluminum wheel"
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
<http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20100202/8d6d01f3/attachment.html>

> charge a premium for their products but they ARE a
> enterprise vendor.? You
> wouldn''t say something like "hey, where can i buy a Ferrari
> without any
> wheels...i''m not paying x amount for a silly aluminum
> wheel"
true. but I buy a Ferrari for the engine and bodywork and chassis engineering.
It is totally criminal what Sun/EMC/Dell/Netapp do charging customers 10x the
open-market rate for standard drives. A RE3/4 or NS drive is the same damn thing
no matter if I buy it from ebay or my local distributor. Dell/Sun/Netapp buy
drives by the container load. Oh sure, I don''t mind paying an extra
couple pennies/GB for all the strenuous efforts the vendors spend on firmware
verification (HA!).

I will happily pay a couple grand for the chassis, backplane, power supplies,
and original engineering. Like my g''papy used to say; don''t
p*ss down my back and tell me it''s raining.

> charge a premium for their products but they ARE a
> enterprise vendor.  You
> wouldn''t say something like "hey, where can i buy a Ferrari
> without any
> wheels...i''m not paying x amount for a silly aluminum
> wheel"
true. but I buy a Ferrari for the engine and bodywork and chassis engineering.
It is totally criminal what Sun/EMC/Dell/Netapp do charging customers 10x the
open-market rate for standard drives. A RE3/4 or NS drive is the same damn thing
no matter if I buy it from ebay or my local distributor. Dell/Sun/Netapp buy
drives by the container load. Oh sure, I don''t mind paying an extra
couple pennies/GB for all the strenuous efforts the vendors spend on firmware
verification (HA!).

I will happily pay a couple grand for the chassis, backplane, power supplies,
and original engineering. Like my g''papy used to say; don''t
p*ss down my back and tell me it''s raining.

On  2/02/10 05:17 PM, matthew patton wrote:
>
>> charge a premium for their products but they ARE a
>> enterprise vendor.  You
>> wouldn''t say something like "hey, where can i buy a
Ferrari
>> without any
>> wheels...i''m not paying x amount for a silly aluminum
>> wheel"
>
> true. but I buy a Ferrari for the engine and bodywork and chassis
 > engineering. It is totally criminal what Sun/EMC/Dell/Netapp do
 > charging customers 10x the open-market rate for standard drives.
 > A RE3/4 or NS drive is the same damn thing no matter if I buy it from
 > ebay or my local distributor. Dell/Sun/Netapp buy drives by the
 > container load. Oh sure, I don''t mind paying an extra couple
pennies/GB for
 >  all the strenuous efforts the vendors spend on firmware verification 
(HA!).
>
> I will happily pay a couple grand for the chassis, backplane,
 > power supplies, and original engineering. Like my g''papy
 > used to say; don''t p*ss down my back and tell me it''s
raining.


Your belief about the amount of time, money and general effort
that goes into qualifying disk drives by storage vendors is
at odds with reality.

The engineering ratings are different to what you can buy from
your local corner PC store, and the firmware is different. The
qualification is done with the assumption that the disks will be
spinning every single second for a number of years, and that
they will have a much, *much* higher duty cycle than consumer
grade hardware.

Please stop assuming that all this only costs a few pennies.
It doesn''t.

James C. McPherson
--
Senior Kernel Software Engineer, Solaris
Sun Microsystems
http://blogs.sun.com/jmcp	http://www.jmcp.homeunix.com/blog

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 1:17 AM, matthew patton <pattonme at yahoo.com>
wrote:
>
> > charge a premium for their products but they ARE a
> > enterprise vendor.  You
> > wouldn''t say something like "hey, where can i buy a
Ferrari
> > without any
> > wheels...i''m not paying x amount for a silly aluminum
> > wheel"
>
> true. but I buy a Ferrari for the engine and bodywork and chassis
> engineering. It is totally criminal what Sun/EMC/Dell/Netapp do charging
> customers 10x the open-market rate for standard drives. A RE3/4 or NS drive
> is the same damn thing no matter if I buy it from ebay or my local
> distributor. Dell/Sun/Netapp buy drives by the container load. Oh sure, I
> don''t mind paying an extra couple pennies/GB for all the strenuous
efforts
> the vendors spend on firmware verification (HA!).
>
> I will happily pay a couple grand for the chassis, backplane, power
> supplies, and original engineering. Like my g''papy used to say;
don''t p*ss
> down my back and tell me it''s raining.
>
>
>
Except you think the original engineering is just a couple grand, and
that''s
where you''re wrong.  I hate the prices just as much as the next guy,
but
they do in fact need to feed their families.  In fact, they need to do a
hell of a lot more than that, including paying off what is likely bumping up
against a 6-figure education for the engineering degrees they hold to design
that hardware.  If it were easy, everyone would be doing it, and it
wouldn''t
be expensive.

If you think they''re overcharging, you''re more than welcome to
go into
business, undercut the shit out of them, and still make a ton of money,
since you think they ''re charging 10x market value.

/rant

--Tim
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
<http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20100202/cf4cd44c/attachment.html>

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 2:17 AM, matthew patton <pattonme at yahoo.com>
wrote:
>
> > charge a premium for their products but they ARE a
> > enterprise vendor.  You
> > wouldn''t say something like "hey, where can i buy a
Ferrari
> > without any
> > wheels...i''m not paying x amount for a silly aluminum
> > wheel"
>
> true. but I buy a Ferrari for the engine and bodywork and chassis
> engineering. It is totally criminal what Sun/EMC/Dell/Netapp do charging
> customers 10x the open-market rate for standard drives. A RE3/4 or NS drive
> is the same damn thing no matter if I buy it from ebay or my local
> distributor. Dell/Sun/Netapp buy drives by the container load. Oh sure, I
> don''t mind paying an extra couple pennies/GB for all the strenuous
efforts
> the vendors spend on firmware verification (HA!).
>
> I will happily pay a couple grand for the chassis, backplane, power
> supplies, and original engineering. Like my g''papy used to say;
don''t p*ss
> down my back and tell me it''s raining.
>
>
>
>
You are just wrong.  totally wrong.
Let''s look at the facts:

Fact:  Sun makes a wonderful software product
Fact:  Sun gives this away for free
Fact:  Sun does this for many reasons but one is so they can sell hardware
Fact:  Sun hardware is a premium product
Fact   When you buy a premium product you are paying for a lot, the actual
cost of the tech is just a small fraction of this cost.  You are paying for
the reputation of that company and the service they provide.

Fact:  you are free to build your own white box server and throw in as many
cheap newegg hard drives as you want
Fact:  It will not be built with the same standards as a sun product

I''m sorry, you want to have your cake and eat it to.

I can''t afford a sun chassis either, but luckily sun DOES give us the
software for free.  You can do what everyone else does and build your own
server.  Don''t complain that they charge to much.  Be happy that they
CAN
charge enough to subsidize your "cheap" servers.

> _______________________________________________
> zfs-discuss mailing list
> zfs-discuss at opensolaris.org
> http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
<http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20100202/f75b21a0/attachment.html>

On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 8:58 PM, matthew patton <pattonme at yahoo.com>
wrote:
> what with the home NAS conversations, what''s the trick to buy a
J4500 without any drives? SUN like every other "enterprise" storage
vendor thinks it''s ok to rape their customers and I for one, am not
interested in paying 10x for a silly SATA hard drive.
To get the topic back to the original question...

There are Supermicro chassis that you can use. This one holds 36
drives, 24 front and 12 rear:
http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4U/847/SC847E16-R1400.cfm ($1800)

This one holds "only" 24 drives:
http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4U/846/SC846TQ-R900.cfm ($950)

Either of those with the CSE-PTJBOD-CB1 ($30), CBL-0166L ($40) and
CBL-0167L($40) parts will be a monster JBOD.

That being said, we used to get Dell JBODs at a previous job, and I
remember the 12 drive shelves being cheap - cheaper than buying bare
drives. This was 8 years ago, so I''m not sure if they''re
discounting
their drives as much.

-B

-- 
Brandon High : bhigh at freaks.com
Mistakes are often the stepping stones to utter failure.

A dumb question:

I see 24 drives in an external chassi. I presume that chassis does only hold
drives, it does not hold a motherboard.

How do you connect all drives to your OpenSolaris server? Do you place them next
to each other, and then you have three 8 SATA ports in your OpenSolaris server,
and have 24 SATA cables in the air? And the chassis are wide open?

Or, am I wrong, does the chassi also hold a motherboard?

Is it possible to have the server in one chassi, and the drives in another
chassi - how do you connect everything?
-- 
This message posted from opensolaris.org

Ok, I see that the chassi contains a mother board. So never mind that question.

Another q:
Is it possible to have large chassi with lots of drives, and the opensolaris in
another chassi, how do you connect them both?
-- 
This message posted from opensolaris.org

On Tue, February 2, 2010 02:24, matthew patton wrote:
> true. but I buy a Ferrari for the engine and bodywork and chassis
> engineering. It is totally criminal what Sun/EMC/Dell/Netapp do charging
> customers 10x the open-market rate for standard drives. A RE3/4 or NS
> drive is the same damn thing no matter if I buy it from ebay or my local
> distributor. Dell/Sun/Netapp buy drives by the container load. Oh sure, I
> don''t mind paying an extra couple pennies/GB for all the strenuous
efforts
> the vendors spend on firmware verification (HA!).
Tell that to Intel and their SSD firmware team, or Seagate:

    http://mswhs.com/2009/01/21/seagate-hard-drive-firmware-bug/

Heck, even things as "low-end" as Netgear''s ReadyNAS product
specify using
only certain versions of the firmware on many drives:

    http://www.readynas.com/?page_id=82

You buy enterprise drives to make sure they work as advertised and
don''t
drop SYNC commands on the floor and then lie to ZFS about it.

Disk may be cheap, but redundancy, iops, backups, and testing are not.

As someone else suggested, you may want to skip the "enterprise"
enclosure
and go with a "consumer" one instead if price is a concern. From home
workloads it may be sufficient to meet your needs.

> true. but I buy a Ferrari for the engine and bodywork and chassis
 > engineering. It is totally criminal what Sun/EMC/Dell/Netapp do charging

its interesting to read this with another thread containing:

 > timeout issue is definitely the WD10EARS disks.
 > replaced 24 of them with ST32000542AS (f/w CC34), and the problem departed
with the WD disks.

everyone needs to eat, if Ferrari spreads their NRE over
the wheels, it might be because they are light and have
been tested to not melt from the heat. Sun/EMC/Dell/Netapp
tests each of their components and sells the total "car".

I''m thankful Sun shares their research and we can build on it.
(btw, netapp ontap 8 is freebsd, and runs on std hardware
after alittle bios work :-)

			Rob

On Tue, February 2, 2010 01:26, James C. McPherson wrote:
> The engineering ratings are different to what you can buy from
> your local corner PC store, and the firmware is different. The
> qualification is done with the assumption that the disks will be
> spinning every single second for a number of years, and that
> they will have a much, *much* higher duty cycle than consumer
> grade hardware.
>
> Please stop assuming that all this only costs a few pennies.
> It doesn''t.
I''m pretty doubtful that the hardware differs from what I can buy from
Newegg or whatever *IF* I buy the same enterprise-grade drive model (WD
S25 or RE-4, say, rather than Caviar Blue) (I don''t know what WD
drives,
if any, are currently qualified for use in any Sun products.)  Just to be
clear, are you asserting that?  Or are you only asserting that the drives
that get qualified are not the cheap drive models most easily found at
your handy corner PC store?  (I have less trouble believing they might
have non-standard microcode.)

I''m simply not Sun''s market (home NAS); $1000 disk drives
simply do not
exist in my home; my budget doesn''t stretch that far.  And I do find it
somewhat offensive that software, controller, and drives can''t find
enough
common standards to actually be able to work (and I''ll pay the money I
need for the duty cycle I need; but in fact my home gear has run 24/7
since 1985, and I''ve had very little problem with disk drives.  In fact
drives most often die for me when the equipment is power-cycled).

(I''ve still got the corpse of at least one 300MB drive from long ago
that
I paid $1500 for, come to think of it!)

-- 
David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/
Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/
Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info

On Tue, February 2, 2010 01:27, Tim Cook wrote:
> Except you think the original engineering is just a couple grand, and
> that''s
> where you''re wrong.  I hate the prices just as much as the next
guy, but
> they do in fact need to feed their families.  In fact, they need to do a
> hell of a lot more than that, including paying off what is likely bumping
> up
> against a 6-figure education for the engineering degrees they hold to
> design
> that hardware.  If it were easy, everyone would be doing it, and it
> wouldn''t
> be expensive.
I don''t think the complaint is mostly about the part Sun engineered,
though; it seems to me the complaint is about the price of what looks and
smells to many of us like essentially the same disk drive we can buy for
1/10 the price at Newegg.

Now, I''m sure not ALL drives offered at Newegg could qualify; but the
question is, how much do I give up by buying an enterprise-grade drive
from a major manufacturer, compared to the Sun-certified drive?

I can easily believe that Sun and the vendors spend many man-months
qualifying a drive, and that perhaps there are even custom firmware
versions for the Sun-certified drives.  For a single drive, what''s a
not-crazy estimate?  12 man-months?  Fully-loaded man-months costing about
$250k/year?  If they sell 10,000 of that drive, the per-drive cost of
qualification would seem to be $25.  Of course, I made up all the numbers,
and have no idea if the quantity in particular is sane or not.  Anyway,
it''s thinking like this that leads some of us to feel that a $900
premium
is not reasonable.  I suppose anybody who really knows sales numbers
can''t
talk about them, and the same for some of the other bits.  Still, the way
to combat misperceptions (if these are in fact misperceptions) is with
more accurate information.

(I actually worked in the group Thumper came out of for a bit; I was
working on the user interface software for the video streaming software
that Thumper was developed to provide storage for.  I was with Sun
2005-2008.)
> If you think they''re overcharging, you''re more than
welcome to go into
> business, undercut the shit out of them, and still make a ton of money,
> since you think they ''re charging 10x market value.
I also think I''m not qualified to do that; I''m a software guy,
neither
management nor marketing nor hardware engineering.

Also, if they really are charging 10x, then they can easily cut prices to
compete with any upstarts, a fact that potential investors would take note
of.
-- 
David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/
Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/
Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 9:45 AM, David Dyer-Bennet <dd-b at dd-b.net>
wrote:
>
> On Tue, February 2, 2010 01:27, Tim Cook wrote:
>
> > Except you think the original engineering is just a couple grand, and
> > that''s
> > where you''re wrong.  I hate the prices just as much as the
next guy, but
> > they do in fact need to feed their families.  In fact, they need to do
a
> > hell of a lot more than that, including paying off what is likely
bumping
> > up
> > against a 6-figure education for the engineering degrees they hold to
> > design
> > that hardware.  If it were easy, everyone would be doing it, and it
> > wouldn''t
> > be expensive.
>
> I don''t think the complaint is mostly about the part Sun
engineered,
> though; it seems to me the complaint is about the price of what looks and
> smells to many of us like essentially the same disk drive we can buy for
> 1/10 the price at Newegg.
>
> Now, I''m sure not ALL drives offered at Newegg could qualify; but
the
> question is, how much do I give up by buying an enterprise-grade drive
> from a major manufacturer, compared to the Sun-certified drive?
>
> I can easily believe that Sun and the vendors spend many man-months
> qualifying a drive, and that perhaps there are even custom firmware
> versions for the Sun-certified drives.  For a single drive, what''s
a
> not-crazy estimate?  12 man-months?  Fully-loaded man-months costing about
> $250k/year?  If they sell 10,000 of that drive, the per-drive cost of
> qualification would seem to be $25.  Of course, I made up all the numbers,
> and have no idea if the quantity in particular is sane or not.  Anyway,
> it''s thinking like this that leads some of us to feel that a $900
premium
> is not reasonable.  I suppose anybody who really knows sales numbers
can''t
> talk about them, and the same for some of the other bits.  Still, the way
> to combat misperceptions (if these are in fact misperceptions) is with
> more accurate information.
>
> (I actually worked in the group Thumper came out of for a bit; I was
> working on the user interface software for the video streaming software
> that Thumper was developed to provide storage for.  I was with Sun
> 2005-2008.)
>
> > If you think they''re overcharging, you''re more than
welcome to go into
> > business, undercut the shit out of them, and still make a ton of
money,
> > since you think they ''re charging 10x market value.
>
> I also think I''m not qualified to do that; I''m a software
guy, neither
> management nor marketing nor hardware engineering.
>
> Also, if they really are charging 10x, then they can easily cut prices to
> compete with any upstarts, a fact that potential investors would take note
> of.
>
>
>
It''s called spreading the costs around.  Would you really rather pay
10x the
price on everything else besides the drives?  This is essentially Sun''s
way
of tiered pricing.  Rather than charge you a software fee based on how much
storage you have, they increase the price of the drives.  Seems fairly
reasonable to me... it gives a low point of entry for people that don''t
need
that much storage without using ridiculous capacity based licensing on
software.

--Tim
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
<http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20100202/735c2241/attachment.html>

On Tue, February 2, 2010 09:58, Tim Cook wrote:
> It''s called spreading the costs around.  Would you really rather
pay 10x
> the price on everything else besides the drives?
This seems to miss the point.  I presented an argument for why I think the
qualified drives are a huge profit-center, not just making a reasonable
profit on the work of qualification.

In general, I''d much rather pay reasonable costs for each piece, rather
than weird costs artificially shoved around to make things come out some
strange way somebody favors.
> This is essentially Sun''s
> way
> of tiered pricing.  Rather than charge you a software fee based on how
> much
> storage you have, they increase the price of the drives.  Seems fairly
> reasonable to me... it gives a low point of entry for people that
don''t
> need
> that much storage without using ridiculous capacity based licensing on
> software.
It works great for me personally -- I''m using the software with other
people''s hardware, for free.

But why should people who need a lot of storage pay proportionally more? 
I don''t get that, that''s grossly wrong.
-- 
David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/
Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/
Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info

On Tue, 2 Feb 2010, David Dyer-Bennet wrote:
>
> Now, I''m sure not ALL drives offered at Newegg could qualify; but
the
> question is, how much do I give up by buying an enterprise-grade drive
> from a major manufacturer, compared to the Sun-certified drive?
If you have a Sun service contract, you give up quite a lot.  If a Sun 
drive fails every other day, then Sun will replace that Sun drive 
every other day, even if the system warranty has expired.  But if it 
is a non-Sun drive, then you have to deal with a disinterested drive 
manufacturer, which could take weeks or months.

My experiences thus far is that if you pay for a Sun service contract, 
then you should definitely pay extra for Sun branded parts.

Hopefully Oracle will do better than Sun at explaining the benefits 
and services provided by a service contract.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/

I agree wholeheartedly....you''re paying to make the problem "go
away" in an
expedient manner. That said, I see how much we spend on NetApp storage at
work and it makes me shudder ;)

I think someone was wondering if the large storage vendors have their own
microcode on drives? I can tell you that NetApp do...and that''s one way
they
"lock you in" (if the drive doesn''t report NetApp firmware,
the filer will
"reject" the drive) and also how they do tricks like
soft-failure/re-validation, 520-byte sectors, etc.

-marc


On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 11:12 AM, Bob Friesenhahn <
bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us> wrote:
> On Tue, 2 Feb 2010, David Dyer-Bennet wrote:
>
>>
>> Now, I''m sure not ALL drives offered at Newegg could qualify;
but the
>> question is, how much do I give up by buying an enterprise-grade drive
>> from a major manufacturer, compared to the Sun-certified drive?
>>
>
> If you have a Sun service contract, you give up quite a lot.  If a Sun
> drive fails every other day, then Sun will replace that Sun drive every
> other day, even if the system warranty has expired.  But if it is a non-Sun
> drive, then you have to deal with a disinterested drive manufacturer, which
> could take weeks or months.
>
> My experiences thus far is that if you pay for a Sun service contract, then
> you should definitely pay extra for Sun branded parts.
>
> Hopefully Oracle will do better than Sun at explaining the benefits and
> services provided by a service contract.
>
> Bob
> --
> Bob Friesenhahn
> bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us,
http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
> GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
>
> _______________________________________________
> zfs-discuss mailing list
> zfs-discuss at opensolaris.org
> http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
<http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20100202/eb18cbe5/attachment.html>

Marc Nicholas <geekything at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think someone was wondering if the large storage vendors have their own
> microcode on drives? I can tell you that NetApp do...and that''s
one way they
> "lock you in" (if the drive doesn''t report NetApp
firmware, the filer will
> "reject" the drive) and also how they do tricks like
> soft-failure/re-validation, 520-byte sectors, etc.
Since IBM started to use SCSI drives more than 20 years ago for their 
mainframes, you can format most drives with any sector size. IBM used 800
or 8000 byte sectors (10 or 100 punch cards ;-), but you also may reformat
a drive with 520 bytes per sector.

J?rg

-- 
 EMail:joerg at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) J?rg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       js at cs.tu-berlin.de                (uni)  
       joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog:
http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily

On Tue, February 2, 2010 10:21, Marc Nicholas wrote:
> I agree wholeheartedly....you''re paying to make the problem
"go away" in
> an
> expedient manner. That said, I see how much we spend on NetApp storage at
> work and it makes me shudder ;)
Yes, exactly.  Pricing must be about right, people wince but pay it :-). 
If they don''t wince it''s too low.

There are certainly places (NASDAQ, say) who have to have absolute
reliability (on both their main and disaster-recovery sites).  That level
of reliability costs money, and they pay it, probably even fairly
cheerfully.

Since spare parts have to be stocked and field service people trained, it
makes sense that service contracts cover limited sets of equipment.  And
that''s a strong argument for staying within that set of equipment.

I do think that a lot of companies buy higher up the reliability curve
than they need.  But that''s their choice.
> I think someone was wondering if the large storage vendors have their own
> microcode on drives? I can tell you that NetApp do...and that''s
one way
> they
> "lock you in" (if the drive doesn''t report NetApp
firmware, the filer will
> "reject" the drive) and also how they do tricks like
> soft-failure/re-validation, 520-byte sectors, etc.
Sigh.  It makes perfect sense that getting some special tricks in the
drives actually pays off.  And yet it''s inevitable that they ALSO use
it
as a lockin.

I''ve seen people down extra days while locked-in parts are shipped to
them; the parts were essentially identical to what you could buy that day
at retail locally, but the locally-available version wouldn''t work.


-- 
David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/
Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/
Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info

This reminds me of this attorney that charged very much for a contract template
he copied and gave to a client. To that, he responded:
-You dont pay for me finding this template and copying to you, which took me 5
minutes. You pay me because I sat 5 years in the university, and have 15 years
of experience. That is why you pay me.

I agree that Sun hardware is way too pricey for a home user, but this is
Enterprise stuff. And you should look at IBM prices, they are 5-10x higher than
Sun''s prices.

I think the Enterprise customers, do not pay for Sun bringing you a disk from
the cellar, which takes 5 minutes. But they pay for all the research,
development, and Sun making sure everything works as intended.

I love that Sun shares their products for free. Which other big Unix vendor does
that?
-- 
This message posted from opensolaris.org

On Feb 2, 2010, at 8:49 AM, David Dyer-Bennet wrote:
> On Tue, February 2, 2010 10:21, Marc Nicholas wrote:
>> I agree wholeheartedly....you''re paying to make the problem
"go away" in
>> an
>> expedient manner. That said, I see how much we spend on NetApp storage
at
>> work and it makes me shudder ;)
> 
> Yes, exactly.  Pricing must be about right, people wince but pay it :-). 
> If they don''t wince it''s too low.
Business 101.
The price will be what the market will bear. If the price seems out of
line with your market, then perhaps you aren''t in the same market.

Personally, I think Ferraris are neat. But here on the ranch, I might be
able to squeeze a bale of hay into the passenger seat, but the low
ground clearance means I''ll have to keep the tractor nearby to pull it
out  when it gets stuck. So a Ferrari has $0 market value here at the ranch.
 -- richard

On February 2, 2010 8:57:32 AM -0800 Orvar Korvar 
<knatte_fnatte_tjatte at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I love that Sun shares their products for free. Which other big Unix
> vendor does that?
Who''s left?

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 11:53 AM, Frank Cusack
<frank+lists/zfs at linetwo.net>wrote:
> On February 2, 2010 8:57:32 AM -0800 Orvar Korvar <
> knatte_fnatte_tjatte at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> I love that Sun shares their products for free. Which other big Unix
>> vendor does that?
>>
>
> Who''s left?
>
>
Pretty sure HP and IBM are still alive and well.

--Tim
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
<http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20100202/cc347eb8/attachment.html>

* On 02 Feb 2010, Orvar Korvar wrote:
> Ok, I see that the chassi contains a mother board. So never mind that
> question.
>
> Another q:  Is it possible to have large chassi with lots of drives,
> and the opensolaris in another chassi, how do you connect them both?
The J4500 and most other storage products being discussed are not
servers: they are SATA concentrators with SAS uplinks.  You plug in
a bunch of cheap SATA disk, and you connect the chassis to a server
with SAS.  The logic board on the storage tray just converts the SAS
signalling to SATA.  It is not a computer in the usual sense.

In many cases such products also have SAS expander ports, so that you
can link multiple storage trays to a single SAS host bus adapter on your
server by daisy-chaining them.

So you need at least one SAS HBA on your OpenSolaris box, and SAS cables
to hook up the trays containing the SATA drives.


To the original question: you can purchase a J4x00 with a limited
number of drives (empty is generally not an option), but there is no
officially-sanctioned way to obtain the drive adapters except to buy Sun
disks.  You need either a SAS or a SATA drive bracket to adapt the drive
to the J4x00 backplane, but they are not sold separately: one ships with
each drive.

As mentioned there are companies that sell remanufactured or discarded
components, or machine their own substitutes.  (Re)marketing Sun or
compatible drive brackets has always been a lively business for a
few small outfits.  But Sun has no involvement with this, and may be
unwilling to support a frankenstein server.

Sun state that their OEM drives are of higher quality than OTS drives
from manufacturers or retailers, and that they have custom firmware that
improves their performance and reliability in Sun storage trays/arrays.
I see no reason to disbelieve that, but it is quite a steep price to pay
for that premium edge.  When cost is a bigger concern than performance
or reliability, I have generally bought the StorEdge product with the
smallest drives I can (250 GB or 500 GB) and upgraded them myself to the
size I really want.  It''s cheaper to buy 20 drives from CDW than 10
from
Sun even when you account for the tiny throwaway drive, and you can keep
the 10 extra as cold spares.  At low enough scale the financial savings
are worth the time to replace them as they fail.

(I wish I could say the same of the StorEdge arrays themselves.  Fully
half of my 2540 controllers have failed, costing me huge amounts of
time in both direct and contractual service, and I''m given up on them
completely as a product line.  I''ll be thrilled to switch to JBOD.)

For larger and less fault-tolerant systems, when money is available,
I''m happy to pay Sun''s premium.

However, as others say, the other brands sometimes offer decent enough
products to use instead of Sun''s enterprise line.  As always, it
depends
on your site''s requirements and budget.  I assume that a home NAS is
comparatively low on both: therefore I wouldn''t even shop with Sun
unless you have a line on cheap castoffs from an enterprise shop.

-- 
 -D.    dgc at uchicago.edu    NSIT    University of Chicago

On February 2, 2010 11:58:17 AM -0600 Tim Cook <tim at cook.ms>
wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 11:53 AM, Frank Cusack
> <frank+lists/zfs at linetwo.net>wrote:
>
>> On February 2, 2010 8:57:32 AM -0800 Orvar Korvar <
>> knatte_fnatte_tjatte at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I love that Sun shares their products for free. Which other big
Unix
>>> vendor does that?
>>>
>>
>> Who''s left?
>>
>>
> Pretty sure HP and IBM are still alive and well.
Yeah but who would want it, even for free. :P

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 12:00 PM, Frank Cusack
<frank+lists/zfs at linetwo.net>wrote:
> On February 2, 2010 11:58:17 AM -0600 Tim Cook <tim at cook.ms>
wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 11:53 AM, Frank Cusack
>> <frank+lists/zfs at linetwo.net>wrote:
>>
>>  On February 2, 2010 8:57:32 AM -0800 Orvar Korvar <
>>> knatte_fnatte_tjatte at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>  I love that Sun shares their products for free. Which other big
Unix
>>>> vendor does that?
>>>>
>>>>
>>> Who''s left?
>>>
>>>
>>>  Pretty sure HP and IBM are still alive and well.
>>
>
> Yeah but who would want it, even for free. :P
>

Not exactly unix, but there''s still VMS clusters running around out
there
with 100% uptime for over 20 years.  I wouldn''t mind seeing it opened
up.

--Tim
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
<http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20100202/2e28e3dc/attachment.html>

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 5:41 AM, Orvar Korvar
<knatte_fnatte_tjatte at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I see 24 drives in an external chassi. I presume that chassis does only
hold drives, it does not hold a motherboard.
>
> How do you connect all drives to your OpenSolaris server? Do you place them
next to each other, and then you have three 8 SATA ports in your OpenSolaris
server, and have 24 SATA cables in the air? And the chassis are wide open?
>
> Or, am I wrong, does the chassi also hold a motherboard?
Both of the cases I posted can hold a motherboard. There is also a kit
available for about $100 that lets you use the chassis with just disk
in it.

-B

-- 
Brandon High : bhigh at freaks.com
For sale: One moral compass, never used.

On February 2, 2010 12:08:13 PM -0600 Tim Cook <tim at cook.ms>
wrote:
> Not exactly unix, but there''s still VMS clusters running around
out there
> with 100% uptime for over 20 years.  I wouldn''t mind seeing it
opened up.
Agreed, I''d love to see that opened up.  Might even give it new life.

100% uptime for 20 years? 

So what makes OpenVMS so much more stable than Unix? What is the difference?
-- 
This message posted from opensolaris.org

Also, both of those chassis come in SAS expander version and JBOD.  the SAS
expander version is the E1 version of the case.  With the SAS Expander, and a
motherboard using the LSI2008 or LSI1068 chipset, you can attach one cable from
the SAS port (SFF8087) to the SAS expander and have all the drives online rather
than connecting 24/36 drives individually. . .
-- 
This message posted from opensolaris.org

1) SAS HBA seems to be an I/O card which has SAS cable connection. It sits in
the OSol server. It is basically just a simple I/O card, right? I hope these
cards are cheap?

2) So I can buy a disk chassi with 24 disks, connect all disks to one SAS cable
and connect that SAS cable to my OSol server, which has a SAS HBA I/O card? Is
this correct? Or do I need one SAS cable for each disk, hence I need 24 SAS
cables?

3) Does the SAS HBA card need Solaris drivers? 

4) Will there be performance hit if I connect 24 disks to one SAS cable/HBA?
Maybe band width in one SAS cable will not suffice for 24 disks?
-- 
This message posted from opensolaris.org

On Tue, February 2, 2010 11:26, Richard Elling wrote:
> On Feb 2, 2010, at 8:49 AM, David Dyer-Bennet wrote:
>> On Tue, February 2, 2010 10:21, Marc Nicholas wrote:
>>> I agree wholeheartedly....you''re paying to make the
problem "go away"
>>> in
>>> an
>>> expedient manner. That said, I see how much we spend on NetApp
storage
>>> at
>>> work and it makes me shudder ;)
>>
>> Yes, exactly.  Pricing must be about right, people wince but pay it
:-).
>> If they don''t wince it''s too low.
>
> Business 101.
> The price will be what the market will bear. If the price seems out of
> line with your market, then perhaps you aren''t in the same market.
Yes, perhaps.  Quite clearly, in this case; I''m not buying enterprise
storage myself.  If the market bears it for long, then there''s
definitely
an actual market there; otherwise it might have been a mistake by the
company.

I want the disk companies to come up with a set of specs for an
enterprise-grade drive that can be used in stock form in relatively simple
hardware to give good results.  This concept that their enterprise-grade
drives need tweaking in the firmware and price to be useful is annoying. 
Fair enough for people pushing the edges of the envelope, but most people
don''t, there should be a good solid mainstream solution available.

A Solaris-based ZFS box using SAS controllers with 5, 8, 24, and 48 drive
bay options might just about do it, if it could take a range of stock
drives officially.  Kill off a big chunk of people who get forced into
enterprise storage against their will.
> Personally, I think Ferraris are neat. But here on the ranch, I might be
> able to squeeze a bale of hay into the passenger seat, but the low
> ground clearance means I''ll have to keep the tractor nearby to
pull it
> out  when it gets stuck. So a Ferrari has $0 market value here at the
> ranch.
Yes, my Camry is good for commuting and running across town through
unfortunately frequent stop-and-go traffic, and running down to see my
mother (about an hour) a lot more than I used to need to.  It can carry 4
very comfortably, which we only use every month or so, and it can carry
the 3-head studio lighting kit in the trunk very comfortably.

Probably still somewhat marginal on your ranch, though better than a
Ferrari.  The ground clearance is medium, and it''s not mainly a
cargo-hauler.
-- 
David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/
Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/
Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 12:54 PM, Orvar Korvar <
knatte_fnatte_tjatte at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 100% uptime for 20 years?
>
> So what makes OpenVMS so much more stable than Unix? What is the
> difference?
>
>
>
They had/have clustering software that was/is bulletproof.  I don''t
think
anyone in the Unix community has duplicated it to date.  As for differences,
google is your friend?
http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/docs/vms_vs_unix.html

--Tim
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
<http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20100202/512db844/attachment.html>

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 2:14 PM, David Dyer-Bennet <dd-b at dd-b.net>
wrote:
>
> On Tue, February 2, 2010 11:26, Richard Elling wrote:
> > On Feb 2, 2010, at 8:49 AM, David Dyer-Bennet wrote:
> >> On Tue, February 2, 2010 10:21, Marc Nicholas wrote:
> >>> I agree wholeheartedly....you''re paying to make the
problem "go away"
> >>> in
> >>> an
> >>> expedient manner. That said, I see how much we spend on NetApp
storage
> >>> at
> >>> work and it makes me shudder ;)
> >>
> >> Yes, exactly.  Pricing must be about right, people wince but pay
it :-).
> >> If they don''t wince it''s too low.
> >
> > Business 101.
> > The price will be what the market will bear. If the price seems out of
> > line with your market, then perhaps you aren''t in the same
market.
>
> Yes, perhaps.  Quite clearly, in this case; I''m not buying
enterprise
> storage myself.  If the market bears it for long, then there''s
definitely
> an actual market there; otherwise it might have been a mistake by the
> company.
>
> I want the disk companies to come up with a set of specs for an
> enterprise-grade drive that can be used in stock form in relatively simple
> hardware to give good results.  This concept that their enterprise-grade
> drives need tweaking in the firmware and price to be useful is annoying.
> Fair enough for people pushing the edges of the envelope, but most people
> don''t, there should be a good solid mainstream solution available.
>
> A Solaris-based ZFS box using SAS controllers with 5, 8, 24, and 48 drive
> bay options might just about do it, if it could take a range of stock
> drives officially.  Kill off a big chunk of people who get forced into
> enterprise storage against their will.
>
How exactly do you suggest the drive manufacturers make their drives "just
work" with every SAS/SATA controller on the market, and all of the quirks
they have?  You''re essentially saying you want the drive manufacturers
to do
what the storage vendors are doing today (all of the integration work), only
not charge you for it.

You can''t have your cake and eat it too.



> Yes, my Camry is good for commuting and running across town through
> unfortunately frequent stop-and-go traffic, and running down to see my
> mother (about an hour) a lot more than I used to need to.  It can carry 4
> very comfortably, which we only use every month or so, and it can carry
> the 3-head studio lighting kit in the trunk very comfortably.
>
> Probably still somewhat marginal on your ranch, though better than a
> Ferrari.  The ground clearance is medium, and it''s not mainly a
> cargo-hauler.
>
>
And how well does your Camry run when you try to replace the Toyota
transmission with one manufactured by Ford?  A mechanic who knows what
he''s
doing and has fabrication skills could probably get it to work, and pretty
darn well, but it isn''t ever going to be the same as buying an
integrated
product directly from Toyota...

--Tim
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
<http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20100202/5d5dcc77/attachment.html>

On Tue, February 2, 2010 14:21, Tim Cook wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 2:14 PM, David Dyer-Bennet <dd-b at dd-b.net>
wrote:
>
>>
>> On Tue, February 2, 2010 11:26, Richard Elling wrote:
>> > On Feb 2, 2010, at 8:49 AM, David Dyer-Bennet wrote:
>> >> On Tue, February 2, 2010 10:21, Marc Nicholas wrote:
>> >>> I agree wholeheartedly....you''re paying to make
the problem "go
>> away"
>> >>> in
>> >>> an
>> >>> expedient manner. That said, I see how much we spend on
NetApp
>> storage
>> >>> at
>> >>> work and it makes me shudder ;)
>> >>
>> >> Yes, exactly.  Pricing must be about right, people wince but
pay it
>> :-).
>> >> If they don''t wince it''s too low.
>> >
>> > Business 101.
>> > The price will be what the market will bear. If the price seems
out of
>> > line with your market, then perhaps you aren''t in the
same market.
>>
>> Yes, perhaps.  Quite clearly, in this case; I''m not buying
enterprise
>> storage myself.  If the market bears it for long, then there''s
>> definitely
>> an actual market there; otherwise it might have been a mistake by the
>> company.
>>
>> I want the disk companies to come up with a set of specs for an
>> enterprise-grade drive that can be used in stock form in relatively
>> simple
>> hardware to give good results.  This concept that their
enterprise-grade
>> drives need tweaking in the firmware and price to be useful is
annoying.
>> Fair enough for people pushing the edges of the envelope, but most
>> people
>> don''t, there should be a good solid mainstream solution
available.
>>
>> A Solaris-based ZFS box using SAS controllers with 5, 8, 24, and 48
>> drive
>> bay options might just about do it, if it could take a range of stock
>> drives officially.  Kill off a big chunk of people who get forced into
>> enterprise storage against their will.
>>
>
> How exactly do you suggest the drive manufacturers make their drives
"just
> work" with every SAS/SATA controller on the market, and all of the
quirks
> they have?  You''re essentially saying you want the drive
manufacturers to
> do
> what the storage vendors are doing today (all of the integration work),
> only not charge you for it.
>
> You can''t have your cake and eat it too.
I''m suggesting that the standard for the interface ought to be
sufficiently standardized and well-enough documented that things meeting
it just work, in the way that desktop motherboards and disk drives "just
work", i.e. well enough for nearly everybody.  I understand why people
pushing the limits would need custom-tuned hardware, but I don''t think
the
middle of the market should need it.

The controllers shouldn''t be full of quirks; companies that routinely
make
them that way need to clean up their act or be driven out of the market. 
Same for the drives.
>> Yes, my Camry is good for commuting and running across town through
>> unfortunately frequent stop-and-go traffic, and running down to see my
>> mother (about an hour) a lot more than I used to need to.  It can carry
>> 4
>> very comfortably, which we only use every month or so, and it can carry
>> the 3-head studio lighting kit in the trunk very comfortably.
>>
>> Probably still somewhat marginal on your ranch, though better than a
>> Ferrari.  The ground clearance is medium, and it''s not mainly
a
>> cargo-hauler.
>>
>>
> And how well does your Camry run when you try to replace the Toyota
> transmission with one manufactured by Ford?  A mechanic who knows what
> he''s
> doing and has fabrication skills could probably get it to work, and pretty
> darn well, but it isn''t ever going to be the same as buying an
integrated
> product directly from Toyota...
When I was first in the industry, in 1969, it was fairly normal to only be
able to connect DEC disks to a PDP-11; but even then there were
third-party manufacturers making products and customers buying them.  Now,
forty years down the road, computers are constructed from mostly generic
components.  The disk drive is one of the ones that went generic first. 
It''s absurd that we can''t handle small enterprise storage on
standards-compliant drives at this point.

-- 
David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/
Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/
Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info

On 2010-Feb-03 00:12:43 +0800, Bob Friesenhahn <bfriesen at
simple.dallas.tx.us> wrote:
>On Tue, 2 Feb 2010, David Dyer-Bennet wrote:
>>
>> Now, I''m sure not ALL drives offered at Newegg could qualify;
but the
>> question is, how much do I give up by buying an enterprise-grade drive
>> from a major manufacturer, compared to the Sun-certified drive?
>
>If you have a Sun service contract, you give up quite a lot.  If a Sun 
>drive fails every other day, then Sun will replace that Sun drive 
>every other day, even if the system warranty has expired.  But if it 
>is a non-Sun drive, then you have to deal with a disinterested drive 
>manufacturer, which could take weeks or months.
OTOH, if I''m paying 10x the street drive price upfront, plus roughly
the street price annually in "support", I can save a fair amount of
money by just buying a pile of spare drives - when one fails, just
swap it for a spare and it doesn''t matter if it takes weeks for the
vendor to swap it.
>Hopefully Oracle will do better than Sun at explaining the benefits 
>and services provided by a service contract.
I know that trying to get Sun to renew a service contract is like
pulling teeth but Oracle is far worse - as far as I can tell, Oracle
contracts are deliberately designed so you can''t be certain whether
you are compliant or not.

-- 
Peter Jeremy

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 3:45 PM, Peter Jeremy <
peter.jeremy at alcatel-lucent.com> wrote:
>
> OTOH, if I''m paying 10x the street drive price upfront, plus
roughly
> the street price annually in "support", I can save a fair amount
of
> money by just buying a pile of spare drives - when one fails, just
> swap it for a spare and it doesn''t matter if it takes weeks for
the
> vendor to swap it.
>
>
I can tell you with the Enterprise storage vendor I deal with, the
maintenance over five years (expected lifetime of the system) is equal or
more than initial, discounted purchase price!

-marc
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
<http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20100202/01bac7b7/attachment.html>

On February 2, 2010 2:17:30 PM -0600 Tim Cook <tim at cook.ms>
wrote:
> http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/docs/vms_vs_unix.html
interesting page, if somewhat dated.  e.g. maybe it wasn''t true at the
time but don''t we now know from the SCO lawsuit that SCO does indeed
own "UNIX"?

as long as we''re OT. :)

>>>>> "bh" == Brandon High <bhigh at freaks.com>
writes:
>>>>> "ok" == Orvar Korvar <knatte_fnatte_tjatte at
yahoo.com> writes:
>>>>> "mp" == matthew patton <pattonme at
yahoo.com> writes:
    bh> This one holds "only" 24 drives:
    bh> http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4U/846/SC846TQ-R900.cfm
    bh> ($950)

This one holds only 20 drives.  includes fan, not power supply.
the airflow management seems shit but basically works okay:

 http://www.servercase.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=CK4020&Category_Code=4UBKBLN
 ($375.38 shipping included)
 (pornographer''s-grade sleds)

I have one of these and am happy with it.  It''s 20 plain SATA ports,
passively.  Competitors'' cases are including SAS switches on the
backplane, and since I don''t know how to buy switches apart from cases
you may need to get a competing case if yuo want a SAS switch.

I found it cheaper to use ATI 790fx board that has four 8-lane PCIe
slots (16x for power, but 8 data lanes active when all four slots are
in use) and then use 1068e cards with breakout cables, so basically
the 790fx chip does the multiplexing.  Obviously this does not scale
as far as a SAS fabric: the 4 PCIe will handle 16 drives, an 8x NIC of
some kind, and an nVidia card.

    ok> Is it possible to have large chassi with lots of
    ok> drives, and the opensolaris in another chassi, how do you
    ok> connect them both?

SAS.  The cabling and the switching chips are eerily reminiscent of
infiniband, but while I think IB has open source drivers and stacks
and relatively generic proprietary firmware, more of the brains of the
SAS fabric seem to be controlled by proprietary software running as
``firmware'''' on all the LSI chips involved, so I think this
landscape
might make harder smartctl, using a cd burner, or offering a SAS
target into the fabric through COMSTAR (AFAIK none of these things
work now---I guess we''ll see what evolves).  but I guess no one built
cheap single chips to tunnel SATA inside IB, so here we are with
broken promises and compromises and overpriced sillyness like FCoE.

In the model numbers of the old 3Gbit/s LSI cards, the second digit
was the number of external ports, and the third digit the number of
internal ports.  For example LSI SAS3801E-R is a mega_sas-drivered
(raid-on-a-card) with 8 external ports, and LSI SAS3081E-R has 8
internal ports.  but if you want a cheaper card with IT firmware for
mpt driver, without RAID-on-a card, yuo may have to hunt some more.
The external ports are offered on one or two single connectors with
four ``ports'''' per connector---each of the four can be broken
out and
connected to an individual disk using a passive four-legged-octopus
cable, or bonded together in sets of four to form a single faster
logical link to a SAS switch chip.  beyond that I don''t really know
how it all works.  I''m probably telling you stuff you already know but
at least hopefully now everyone''s caught up.

    mp> I buy a Ferrari for the engine and bodywork and chassis
    mp> engineering.

Didn''t they go through bankruptcy repeatedly and then get bought by
Fiat?  Whatever this folded-sheetmetal crap thing from so-called
``servercase.com'''' is, it''s probably backed secretly
by the chinese
government, and I bet it outlasts your fancy J4500.  This seems to me
like a bad situation, but I''m not sure what to do about it.

There are many ways to slice the market vertically.  For example you
could also get your integration done by renting whitebox crap through
a server-rental company that rents you dedicated storage or compute
nodes at 10 or 100 at a time pre-connected by network equipment they
won''t discuss with you (probably cheaper than the cisco stuff
you''d
definitely buy if it were your own ass on the line).  Part of Sun''s
function is prequalifying but another part is to reach inside their
customer''s organizations, extract experience, and then share it among
all customers discretely without any one customer feeling violated.  A
hardware rental company can do the same thing, and I bet they can do
it at similar scale, with a lot less political bullshit.  I think
there''s a big messy underground market of these shady rental companies
in parallel to the above-ground overblogged overpriced flakey EC2-like
stuff.  My hope is that the IB stack, in which Sun''s also apparently
deeply invested with both Solaris and IB-included blades and switches
and backplanes and onboard MAC''s, will start taking a chunk out of
Cisco''s pie.  Meanwhile the box-renting company extracts money from
you by performing an ass-covering function: they can buy cheap risky
things you can''t, and then you say to your minders, ``other people buy
from them too.  It was not reckless to become their customer.  I''ve
both saved you money and manoevered you the agility to evade the
problems we''ve had without writing off a lot of
purchases,'''' when
really what you are outsourcing here is your own expensive CYA
tendencies.

But back to the potential pie-slice for Sun to steal: the function of
the IB switching chips themselves are far simpler and cheaper than
Ethernet because the gigantic output buffers in, ex., Arista, are
simply missing---the network itself is fundamentally cheaper and less
capable than Ethernet which has output buffers to eliminate blocking,
but stingily eliminating these buffers and making a cheap HOL-blocking
fabric is actually *better* for storage.  For iSCSI you have to buy
Ethernet switches which have large RED output buffers, while all the
storage optimized networks like FC and SAS are blocking, bufferless
fabrics like IB and Myri.  With FCoE, you pay for the buffers and then
*disable* them in certain CoS''s!  idiotic.  Sun looks to be finally
finishing off the IB software and maybe delivering some of the ancient
unkept promises of a converged network, with RDMA bindings for NFS and
COMSTAR (iSER), and cluster-friendly QFS-like schemes like Lustre and
pNFS which are also RDMA-ified.  If the competition is FCoE, then the
competition will have to provide much more complicated and less old
ASIC''s in their switching mesh, and huge buffers, while Sun can simply
resurrect some mellanox reference designs from a half-decade ago and
have a faster finished system, so there is some room to extract
``market forces'''' premiums from this clue gap.  If you have a
look at
some of Cisco''s old failed competitors like Extreme, compare the
linecards of 64Gbit/s Extreme Alpine platform which have like 3 chips
on them, and the rest empty green mask, with cisco 6500/sup32 32Gbit/s
platform (which is of similar if not newer vintage) which is
legacy-heavy and packed with multiple layered boards of
expensive-looking chips with messy heatsinks.  Extreme failed for
reasons---the 6500 has fundamental features the Alpine doesn''t, and
flow-forwarding can''t really be safely used outside a LAN---but just
looking at the Alpine boards next to the 6500 boards and realizing,
for some nontrivial applications, these two platforms are actually
equivalent!  It gives one the idea there''s money to be squeezed from
this cow.  and FCoE is just dumb if you have IB, honestly.

this is all just dumb blogger ranting though.  We''ll see what happens.

All I''m saying is, there''s more in the world to integrate than
the way
a hard drive fits inside a chassis, and there are some people on the
cost-conscious non-banking side of the spectrum whose businesses are
retarded from lack of said integration.  The future shouldn''t be a
choice between $1000 sleds, and rudderless stagnant peecee crap.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 304 bytes
Desc: not available
URL:
<http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20100202/9540ea80/attachment.bin>

On Feb 2, 2010, at 10:54 AM, Orvar Korvar wrote:
> 100% uptime for 20 years? 
> 
> So what makes OpenVMS so much more stable than Unix? What is the
difference?
Software reliability studies show that the more reliable software is
old software that hasn''t changed :-)

On Feb 2, 2010, at 12:42 PM, David Dyer-Bennet wrote:
> I''m suggesting that the standard for the interface ought to be
> sufficiently standardized and well-enough documented that things meeting
> it just work, in the way that desktop motherboards and disk drives
"just
> work", i.e. well enough for nearly everybody.  I understand why people
> pushing the limits would need custom-tuned hardware, but I don''t
think the
> middle of the market should need it.
Every mobo and disk I own has quirks. The only time things settle down
to a widely accepted norm is when innovation stops.  For example, recently
the SATA TRIM command has received a lot of press.  Next quarter, it will
be some other feature on the buzzword list.
> The controllers shouldn''t be full of quirks; companies that
routinely make
> them that way need to clean up their act or be driven out of the market. 
> Same for the drives.
I think there are only about 5 HDD companies (Hitachi, Seagate, Western
Digital, Samsung, Toshiba) and 3 controller companies today (LSI, Marvell, 
Intel). The remainder are in the process of getting out of the business or being
bought.  Interesting history here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_hard_disk_manufacturers
 -- richard

On February 2, 2010 4:31:47 PM -0500 Miles Nordin <carton at Ivy.NET>
wrote:
>  and FCoE is just dumb if you have IB, honestly.
by FCoE are you talking about iSCSI?

On Tue, 2 Feb 2010, Frank Cusack wrote:
> On February 2, 2010 4:31:47 PM -0500 Miles Nordin <carton at Ivy.NET>
wrote:
>>  and FCoE is just dumb if you have IB, honestly.
>
> by FCoE are you talking about iSCSI?
No.  They are different.  FCoE uses "raw" ethernet packets and 
ethernet switches can/should be specially designed to support it 
whereas iSCSI is a TCP-based protocol.  FCoE is basically fiber 
channel "SAN" protocol over ethernet.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/

On Feb 2, 2010, at 1:56 PM, Frank Cusack wrote:
> On February 2, 2010 4:31:47 PM -0500 Miles Nordin <carton at Ivy.NET>
wrote:
>> and FCoE is just dumb if you have IB, honestly.
> 
> by FCoE are you talking about iSCSI?
FCoE is to iSCSI as Netware (IPX/SPX) is to NFS :-)
 -- richard

On Feb 2, 2010, at 15:17, Tim Cook wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 12:54 PM, Orvar Korvar wrote:
>
>> 100% uptime for 20 years?
>>
>> So what makes OpenVMS so much more stable than Unix? What is the
>> difference?
>>
>
> They had/have clustering software that was/is bulletproof.  I
don''t
> think
> anyone in the Unix community has duplicated it to date.  As for  
> differences,
> google is your friend?
>
> http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/docs/vms_vs_unix.html
And by "clustering" we''re not talking about something like
Sun Cluster
where it restarts an application after a node fails. It''s more along  
the lines of multiple machines acting as a single server (though each  
runs its own copy of the OS--not a single image system):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVMS#Clustering
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMScluster

It was originally released in VMS version 4 back in 1984.

VMS originally ran on VAX, was ported to DEC''s Alpha (now dead), and  
is now on Intel''s Itanium (not that popular AFAIK).

On Feb 2, 2010, at 15:21, Tim Cook wrote:
> How exactly do you suggest the drive manufacturers make their drives  
> "just
> work" with every SAS/SATA controller on the market, and all of the  
> quirks
> they have?  You''re essentially saying you want the drive  
> manufacturers to do
> what the storage vendors are doing today (all of the integration  
> work), only
> not charge you for it.
One way is to have bug-free firmware software in both the disk and the  
controllers that follows the specs perfectly. :)

On Feb 2, 2010, at 2:56 PM, David Magda wrote:
> 
> On Feb 2, 2010, at 15:17, Tim Cook wrote:
> 
>> On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 12:54 PM, Orvar Korvar wrote:
>> 
>>> 100% uptime for 20 years?
>>> 
>>> So what makes OpenVMS so much more stable than Unix? What is the
>>> difference?
>>> 
>> 
>> They had/have clustering software that was/is bulletproof.  I
don''t think
>> anyone in the Unix community has duplicated it to date.  As for
differences,
>> google is your friend?
>> 
>> http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/docs/vms_vs_unix.html
> 
> And by "clustering" we''re not talking about something
like Sun Cluster where it restarts an application after a node fails.
It''s more along the lines of multiple machines acting as a single
server (though each runs its own copy of the OS--not a single image system):
Did you ever wonder why Solaris Cluster seemed to be overkill for a 
simple failover service?  The original design goals for Solaris Cluster
looked a lot more like VMScluster than what you see today in Solaris
Cluster. You can see the remnants remain in the code and features like
pxfs (no, ZFS won''t work with pxfs). The barriers to bringing such 
technology from a simple process model (like VMS) to a modern OS
like Solaris are daunting.
 -- richard

I believe magical unicorn controllers and drives are both bug-free and
100% spec compliant. The leprichorns sell them if you''re trying to
find them ;)

-marc

On 2/2/10, David Magda <dmagda at ee.ryerson.ca>
wrote:
> On Feb 2, 2010, at 15:21, Tim Cook wrote:
>
>> How exactly do you suggest the drive manufacturers make their drives
>> "just
>> work" with every SAS/SATA controller on the market, and all of the
>> quirks
>> they have?  You''re essentially saying you want the drive
>> manufacturers to do
>> what the storage vendors are doing today (all of the integration
>> work), only
>> not charge you for it.
>
> One way is to have bug-free firmware software in both the disk and the
> controllers that follows the specs perfectly. :)
>
> _______________________________________________
> zfs-discuss mailing list
> zfs-discuss at opensolaris.org
> http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
>
-- 
Sent from my mobile device

>>>>> "fc" == Frank Cusack <frank+lists/zfs at
linetwo.net> writes:
    fc> by FCoE are you talking about iSCSI?

FCoE is an L2 design where ethernet ``pause'''' frames can be
sent
specific to one of the seven CoS levels instead of applying to the
entire port, which makes PAUSE abuseable for other purposes than their
former one.  CoS is an L2 priority/QoS tag inside the VLAN header.
Before this hack, pause frames are not useful for congestion
management because they cause head-of-line blocking, so serious
switches only send them in response to backplane congestion, and for
example serious hosts might send them for PCI contention, if clever
enough.  With the hack, the HOL-blocking effect of a PAUSE still
spreads further than you might ideally like but can be constrained to
one of the seven CoS planes in your fabric (probably, the Storage
plane).  This lets you have an HOL-blocking, lossless storage fabric
in parallel with a buffered TCP fabric that is not lossless (uses
packet drops for congestion control like normal Ethernet).  You will
find some squirrely language from FCoE proponents around these issues
because they are trying to convince you that you have every desireable
buzzword in every part of your network, while in fact what you''re
doing is making the same wise trade-off that every other non-Ethernet
LAN fabric has always made.  My parallel point is that the
HOL-blocking lossless fabric is *CHEAPER* to create, not nmore
expensive.  It is less capable.  It has no buffers and therefore no
QoS.  It just happens to be what''s best for storage.  so, they want
you to pay the prices of a multi-queued QoSed WRED big-buffered
non-blocking fabric suitable for transit traffic even though you
mostly just need to push storage bits: classic upsell, just like all
those ``XL'''' PFC''s they try to push off to customers
who are not even
in the DFZ.

FCoE also includes a bunch of expensive hocus-pokus to bridge these
frames onto a traditional FC-switched network and do a bunch of other
things I don''t understand like FC zoning and F-SPF.  Most of the pitch
dwells on this, trying to convince you they''ve made things
``simpler''''
for you because it''s once piece of wire.  This seems like an
anti-feature to me: wire''s cheap while understanding things is hard,
and now everyone''s forced to catch up and learn Fibre Channel before
it''s safe to touch anything.  Good in the long run, absolutely.
Cheaper, fuck no.

but the legitimate pitch for FCoE over iSCSI, to my view right now,
comes from not from this management baloney but from the seven CoS
levels, and the possibility some can be blocking and others buffered.
Internet *transit* traffic (as opposed to end systems), and anything
high-rtt, *must* be buffered, while within the LAN my current thinking
is that you''re better off with a 10Gbit/s HOL-blocking bufferless link
than a 1Gbit/s non-blocking buffered link.  The latter applies double
for storage traffic which, made up of UDP-like reads and writes where
you are stuck trying to perfect TCP to avoid blowing the buffers of
normal switches while still getting yourself out of slow-start before
the transaction''s over andn doing all this in an environment where you
cannot even convince thick-skulled netadmins they NEED to provide RED,
not this bullshit ``weighted tail drop'''' of 3560 u.s.w., and
which
besides really need backpressure from the fabric so they can be QoS''ed
in the initiator''s stack ahead of the network so that for example
scrubs don''t slow down pools (don''t you find this happens more
over
iSCSI than over SAS?).  I''m saaying, um...shit...saying, ``You need to
think, about what you are trying to accomplish,'''' and that Sun
might
have a suite of protocols based on ancient IB stuff that accomplishes
more than FCoE, and does it cheaper (to them) and more simply, so,
following their usual annoying plan, step 2 charge FCoE prices minus
<smallnumber>, step 3 profit.

meanwhile mellanox, having forseen all this and built open standards
to solve it, is out there desperately trying to push some baloney
called Etherband or something because all you bank admins are too daft
to buy anything that does not have Ether in the name. :(
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 304 bytes
Desc: not available
URL:
<http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20100202/cf1627ed/attachment.bin>

On Tue, 2 Feb 2010, Miles Nordin wrote:
>>>>>> "fc" == Frank Cusack <frank+lists/zfs at
linetwo.net> writes:
>
>    fc> by FCoE are you talking about iSCSI?
>
> FCoE is an L2 design where ethernet ``pause'''' frames can
be sent
> specific to one of the seven CoS levels instead of applying to the
> entire port, which makes PAUSE abuseable for other purposes than their
Please redirect this encyclopedia contribution to WikiPedia, where it 
belongs.

Thanks,

Bob
> former one.  CoS is an L2 priority/QoS tag inside the VLAN header.
> Before this hack, pause frames are not useful for congestion
> management because they cause head-of-line blocking, so serious
> switches only send them in response to backplane congestion, and for
> example serious hosts might send them for PCI contention, if clever
> enough.  With the hack, the HOL-blocking effect of a PAUSE still
> spreads further than you might ideally like but can be constrained to
> one of the seven CoS planes in your fabric (probably, the Storage
> plane).  This lets you have an HOL-blocking, lossless storage fabric
> in parallel with a buffered TCP fabric that is not lossless (uses
> packet drops for congestion control like normal Ethernet).  You will
> find some squirrely language from FCoE proponents around these issues
> because they are trying to convince you that you have every desireable
> buzzword in every part of your network, while in fact what you''re
> doing is making the same wise trade-off that every other non-Ethernet
> LAN fabric has always made.  My parallel point is that the
> HOL-blocking lossless fabric is *CHEAPER* to create, not nmore
> expensive.  It is less capable.  It has no buffers and therefore no
> QoS.  It just happens to be what''s best for storage.  so, they
want
> you to pay the prices of a multi-queued QoSed WRED big-buffered
> non-blocking fabric suitable for transit traffic even though you
> mostly just need to push storage bits: classic upsell, just like all
> those ``XL'''' PFC''s they try to push off to
customers who are not even
> in the DFZ.
>
> FCoE also includes a bunch of expensive hocus-pokus to bridge these
> frames onto a traditional FC-switched network and do a bunch of other
> things I don''t understand like FC zoning and F-SPF.  Most of the
pitch
> dwells on this, trying to convince you they''ve made things
``simpler''''
> for you because it''s once piece of wire.  This seems like an
> anti-feature to me: wire''s cheap while understanding things is
hard,
> and now everyone''s forced to catch up and learn Fibre Channel
before
> it''s safe to touch anything.  Good in the long run, absolutely.
> Cheaper, fuck no.
>
> but the legitimate pitch for FCoE over iSCSI, to my view right now,
> comes from not from this management baloney but from the seven CoS
> levels, and the possibility some can be blocking and others buffered.
> Internet *transit* traffic (as opposed to end systems), and anything
> high-rtt, *must* be buffered, while within the LAN my current thinking
> is that you''re better off with a 10Gbit/s HOL-blocking bufferless
link
> than a 1Gbit/s non-blocking buffered link.  The latter applies double
> for storage traffic which, made up of UDP-like reads and writes where
> you are stuck trying to perfect TCP to avoid blowing the buffers of
> normal switches while still getting yourself out of slow-start before
> the transaction''s over andn doing all this in an environment where
you
> cannot even convince thick-skulled netadmins they NEED to provide RED,
> not this bullshit ``weighted tail drop'''' of 3560 u.s.w.,
and which
> besides really need backpressure from the fabric so they can be
QoS''ed
> in the initiator''s stack ahead of the network so that for example
> scrubs don''t slow down pools (don''t you find this happens
more over
> iSCSI than over SAS?).  I''m saaying, um...shit...saying, ``You
need to
> think, about what you are trying to accomplish,'''' and
that Sun might
> have a suite of protocols based on ancient IB stuff that accomplishes
> more than FCoE, and does it cheaper (to them) and more simply, so,
> following their usual annoying plan, step 2 charge FCoE prices minus
> <smallnumber>, step 3 profit.
>
> meanwhile mellanox, having forseen all this and built open standards
> to solve it, is out there desperately trying to push some baloney
> called Etherband or something because all you bank admins are too daft
> to buy anything that does not have Ether in the name. :(
>
--
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/

On 2-Feb-10, at 1:54 PM, Orvar Korvar wrote:
> 100% uptime for 20 years?
>
> So what makes OpenVMS so much more stable than Unix? What is the  
> difference?

The short answer is that uptimes like that are VMS *cluster* uptimes.  
Individual hosts don''t necessarily have that uptime, but the cluster  
availability is maintained for extremely long periods.

You can probably find more discussion of this in comp.os.vms.

--Toby
> -- 
> This message posted from opensolaris.org
> _______________________________________________
> zfs-discuss mailing list
> zfs-discuss at opensolaris.org
> http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 9:52 PM, Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au>
wrote:
>
> On 2-Feb-10, at 1:54 PM, Orvar Korvar wrote:
>
>  100% uptime for 20 years?
>>
>> So what makes OpenVMS so much more stable than Unix? What is the
>> difference?
>>
>
>
> The short answer is that uptimes like that are VMS *cluster* uptimes.
> Individual hosts don''t necessarily have that uptime, but the
cluster
> availability is maintained for extremely long periods.
>
> You can probably find more discussion of this in comp.os.vms.

And the 15MB/sec of I/O throughput on that state-of-the-art cluster is
something to write home about? ;)

Seriously, as someone alluded to earlier, we''re not comparing apples to
applies. And a 9000 series VAX Cluster was one of the earlier multi-user
systems I worked on for reference ;)

Making that kind of stuff work with modern expectations and tolerances is a
whole new kettle of fish...


-marc
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
<http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20100202/db9cce06/attachment.html>

>
> This seems to miss the point.  I presented an argument for why I think the
> qualified drives are a huge profit-center, not just making a reasonable
> profit on the work of qualification.
>
> In general, I''d much rather pay reasonable costs for each piece,
rather
> than weird costs artificially shoved around to make things come out some
> strange way somebody favors.
>
> Thats easy for you to SAY but the fact of the matter is, in the REAL world
it doesn''t hold water.  Almost all types of products have this exact
same
model.  It''s around because it works.  It''s true for cheetos,
cars, and hard
drives.  Saying you''d rather pay a "fair price" for things
down the line and
actually DOING it are 2 different things.  I think if all companies followed
that mentality you''d see that you''d end up paying more, not
less.


>
> It works great for me personally -- I''m using the software with
other
> people''s hardware, for free.
>
> But why should people who need a lot of storage pay proportionally more?
> I don''t get that, that''s grossly wrong.
> --
>
They don''t HAVE to pay more.  It''s about being realistic. 
People who buy
sun hardware are doing so for more reasons that "to have a lot of
storage"

The cost per gb isn''t the only factor that should be thought of.  For
raw
storage its certainly cheaper to buy a cheap case, throw in 20-24 1-2tb
consumer grade drives in 2-3 raidz2''s and have a reasonable level of
fault
tollerance, but that TOTALLY misses the point.  You don''t buy a sunfire
x4540 or j45xx just for raw storage.  If you want the cheapest raw storage
possible you can always go build one of those blackblaze storage pods.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
<http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20100203/62b74ee3/attachment.html>

"David Dyer-Bennet" <dd-b at dd-b.net> wrote:

> When I was first in the industry, in 1969, it was fairly normal to only be
> able to connect DEC disks to a PDP-11; but even then there were
> third-party manufacturers making products and customers buying them.  Now,
> forty years down the road, computers are constructed from mostly generic
> components.  The disk drive is one of the ones that went generic first. 
> It''s absurd that we can''t handle small enterprise storage
on
> standards-compliant drives at this point.
If a company advertizes for being SCSI or SATA compliant, you need to be able to
connect every drive that is compliant to the standard. If this is not the case, 
you can (in Europe) give the machine back to the seller.

I remember how ever a case ~ 14 years ago, where Seagate did sell SCSI disks
that did not handle tagged command queing and disconnect/reconnect correctly. 
As a result, machines with these drives did hang. Sun at the same time did
sell drives with Sun specific firmware that have been OK.

Around 1990 we (H.Berthold AG - at that time second biggest Sun OEM) did also 
sell disks with specific firmware that we ordered from the manufacturer after 
we did run into problems with standard firmware. We also did sell disks to our
customers for more than the "street price" and the customers did get
extra value
for this.

If you buy an unapproved disk, things should work, but if you get in trouble 
later, you may have to hire experts that help you to prove _which_ company
did give you the defective hardware or system as only this company would need
to give warranty help.

J?rg

-- 
 EMail:joerg at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) J?rg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       js at cs.tu-berlin.de                (uni)  
       joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog:
http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily

On 2-Feb-10, at 10:11 PM, Marc Nicholas wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 9:52 PM, Toby Thain  
> <toby at telegraphics.com.au> wrote:
>
> On 2-Feb-10, at 1:54 PM, Orvar Korvar wrote:
>
> 100% uptime for 20 years?
>
> So what makes OpenVMS so much more stable than Unix? What is the  
> difference?
>
>
> The short answer is that uptimes like that are VMS *cluster*  
> uptimes. Individual hosts don''t necessarily have that uptime, but
> the cluster availability is maintained for extremely long periods.
>
> You can probably find more discussion of this in comp.os.vms.
>
> And the 15MB/sec of I/O throughput on that state-of-the-art cluster  
> is something to write home about? ;)
>
> Seriously, as someone alluded to earlier, we''re not comparing  
> apples to applies. And a 9000 series VAX Cluster was one of the  
> earlier multi-user systems I worked on for reference ;)
>
> Making that kind of stuff work with modern expectations and  
> tolerances is a whole new kettle of fish...

OpenVMS runs on modern gear (Itanium).

--Toby
>
>
> -marc
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
<http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20100203/adddeb96/attachment.html>

On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 8:58 PM, matthew patton <pattonme at yahoo.com>
wrote:
> what with the home NAS conversations, what''s the trick to buy a
J4500 without any drives? SUN like every other "enterprise" storage
vendor thinks it''s ok to rape their customers and I for one, am not
interested in paying 10x for a silly SATA hard drive.
Another solution, for a true DIY x4500: BackBlaze has schematics for
the 45 drive chassis that they designed available on their website.
http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/

Someone brought it up on the list a few months ago (which is how I
know about it) and there was some interesting discussion at that time.
There''s no way I would use something like this for most installs, but
there is definitely some use. Now that opensolaris supports sata pmp,
you could use a similar chassis for a zfs pool.

-B

-- 
Brandon High : bhigh at freaks.com
For sale: One moral compass, never used.

On Wed, February 3, 2010 17:02, Brandon High wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 8:58 PM, matthew patton <pattonme at
yahoo.com> wrote:
>> what with the home NAS conversations, what''s the trick to buy
a J4500
>> without any drives? SUN like every other "enterprise" storage
vendor
>> thinks it''s ok to rape their customers and I for one, am not
interested
>> in paying 10x for a silly SATA hard drive.
>
> Another solution, for a true DIY x4500: BackBlaze has schematics for
> the 45 drive chassis that they designed available on their website.
>
http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/
I''m just coming up on upgrading my 800GB pool to 1.2TB.  I know some
home
NAS setups with 10 times my capacity, but I don''t know how much data
they
actually have on them.  And 10 times my capacity actually fits in my
current chassis with modern drives; I''m just still using the 400GB
drives
I put in originally, and have two more sitting around for the upgrade
I''m
heading towards.

Which is to say that 45 drives is really quite a lot for a HOME NAS. 
Particularly when you then think about backing up that data.
-- 
David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/
Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/
Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 3:13 PM, David Dyer-Bennet <dd-b at dd-b.net>
wrote:
> Which is to say that 45 drives is really quite a lot for a HOME NAS.
> Particularly when you then think about backing up that data.
The origin of this thread was how to buy a J4500 (48 drive chassis).

One thing that I enjoy about this list (and I''m sure the Sun guys get
annoyed about) is the discussion of how to build various "small"
systems for home use. After sitting on the sidelines for a while, I
assembled an 8TB server for home.

Yeah, 8TB is more than I can backup over my home DSL connection. But
it''s only got about 2.5TB in use, and most of that is our DVD
collection that I''ve ripped to play on the Popcorn Hour in our living
room, or CDs that I''ve ripped. I''d hate to have to re-rip it
all, but
I can get it back. The rest is photos and important documents which
are copied to a VM instance and backed up offsite via Mozy.

I''m considering doing a send/receive of a few volumes to a
friend''s
system (as he will do to mine) to have offsite backups of the pools.
It''s mostly dependent on him buying more disk. ;-)

And for what it''s worth, my toying with ZFS and discussing it with
coworkers has raised interest in Sun''s storage line to replace NetApp
at the office.

-B

-- 
Brandon High : bhigh at freaks.com
If violence doesn''t solve your problem, you''re not using
enough of it.

Brandon High wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 3:13 PM, David Dyer-Bennet <dd-b at dd-b.net>
wrote:
>   
>> Which is to say that 45 drives is really quite a lot for a HOME NAS.
>> Particularly when you then think about backing up that data.
>>     
>
> The origin of this thread was how to buy a J4500 (48 drive chassis).
>
> One thing that I enjoy about this list (and I''m sure the Sun guys
get
> annoyed about) is the discussion of how to build various "small"
> systems for home use.
We don''t get annoyed at all.
What do you think we build to run at home? ;-)
> After sitting on the sidelines for a while, I
> assembled an 8TB server for home.
>
> Yeah, 8TB is more than I can backup over my home DSL connection. But
> it''s only got about 2.5TB in use, and most of that is our DVD
> collection that I''ve ripped to play on the Popcorn Hour in our
living
> room, or CDs that I''ve ripped. I''d hate to have to re-rip
it all, but
> I can get it back. The rest is photos and important documents which
> are copied to a VM instance and backed up offsite via Mozy.
>
> I''m considering doing a send/receive of a few volumes to a
friend''s
> system (as he will do to mine) to have offsite backups of the pools.
> It''s mostly dependent on him buying more disk. ;-)
>
> And for what it''s worth, my toying with ZFS and discussing it with
> coworkers has raised interest in Sun''s storage line to replace
NetApp
> at the office.
Absolutely.

My homebrew system has come up in many conversations about ZFS, which 
has ended up with a customer buying a Thumpers or Amber Road systems 
from Sun. (but that''s my job, I guess;-)

-- 
Andrew

On Wed, Feb 03, 2010 at 03:02:21PM -0800, Brandon High wrote:
> Another solution, for a true DIY x4500: BackBlaze has schematics for
> the 45 drive chassis that they designed available on their website.
>
http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/
> 
> Someone brought it up on the list a few months ago (which is how I
> know about it) and there was some interesting discussion at that time.
IIRC the consensus was that the vibration dampening was inadequate
and the interfaces oversubscribed and the disks being not nearline
too unreliable, but I might be misremembering.

I''m still happy with my 16x WD RE4 drives (linux mdraid RAID 10,
CentOS, Oracle, no zfs). Supermicro does 36x drive chassis now
http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4U/?chs=847 so budget
DIY for zfs is about 72 TByte raw storage with 2 TByte nearline
SATA drives.

I''ve had trouble finding internal 2x 2.5" in one 3.5" 
SSD mounts from Supermicro for hybrid zfs, but no doubt one 
could improvise something from the usual ricer supplies. 

On smaller scale http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/2U/?chs=216
works well with 2.5" Intel SSDs and VelociRaptors. I hope to be able
to use one for a hybrid zfs iSCSI target for VMWare, probably with
10 GBit Ethernet.
> There''s no way I would use something like this for most installs,
but
> there is definitely some use. Now that opensolaris supports sata pmp,
> you could use a similar chassis for a zfs pool.
-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

matthew patton <pattonme at yahoo.com> writes:
> true. but I buy a Ferrari for the engine and bodywork and chassis
> engineering. It is totally criminal what Sun/EMC/Dell/Netapp do
> charging customers 10x the open-market rate for standard drives. A
> RE3/4 or NS drive is the same damn thing no matter if I buy it from
> ebay or my local distributor. Dell/Sun/Netapp buy drives by the
> container load. Oh sure, I don''t mind paying an extra couple
> pennies/GB for all the strenuous efforts the vendors spend on firmware
> verification (HA!).
I don''t know what the J4500 drive sled contains, but for the J4200 and
J4400 they need to include quite a bit of circuitry to handle SAS
protocol all the way, for multipathing and to be able to accept a mix of
SAS and SATA drives.  it''s not just a piece of sheet metal, some
plastic
and a LED.

the pricing does look strange, and I think it would be better to raise
the price of the enclosure (which is silly cheap when empty IMHO) and
reduce the drive prices somewhat.  but that''s just psychology, and
doesn''t really matter for total cost.

-- 
Kjetil T. Homme
Redpill Linpro AS - Changing the game

On 2/6/10 4:51 PM +0100 Kjetil Torgrim Homme wrote:
> the pricing does look strange, and I think it would be better to raise
> the price of the enclosure (which is silly cheap when empty IMHO) and
> reduce the drive prices somewhat.  but that''s just psychology, and
> doesn''t really matter for total cost.
better for whom? :)

if the total price is the same, it''s "better" (for Sun) to
charge as much
for the razor blades as the market will bear.

On Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 9:51 AM, Kjetil Torgrim Homme <kjetilho at
linpro.no>wrote:
> matthew patton <pattonme at yahoo.com> writes:
>
> > true. but I buy a Ferrari for the engine and bodywork and chassis
> > engineering. It is totally criminal what Sun/EMC/Dell/Netapp do
> > charging customers 10x the open-market rate for standard drives. A
> > RE3/4 or NS drive is the same damn thing no matter if I buy it from
> > ebay or my local distributor. Dell/Sun/Netapp buy drives by the
> > container load. Oh sure, I don''t mind paying an extra couple
> > pennies/GB for all the strenuous efforts the vendors spend on firmware
> > verification (HA!).
>
> I don''t know what the J4500 drive sled contains, but for the J4200
and
> J4400 they need to include quite a bit of circuitry to handle SAS
> protocol all the way, for multipathing and to be able to accept a mix of
> SAS and SATA drives.  it''s not just a piece of sheet metal, some
plastic
> and a LED.
>
> the pricing does look strange, and I think it would be better to raise
> the price of the enclosure (which is silly cheap when empty IMHO) and
> reduce the drive prices somewhat.  but that''s just psychology, and
> doesn''t really matter for total cost.
>
> --
> Kjetil T. Homme
> Redpill Linpro AS - Changing the game
>
>
>
Why exactly would that be better?  Then it''s a high cost of entry. 
What if
an SMB only needs 6 drives day one?  Why charge them an arm and a leg for
the enclosure, and nothing for the drives?  Again, the idea is that
you''re
charging based on capacity.  Generally speaking, an entity that needs tons
and tons of storage has the money to pay for it.  Home users ripping
legitimately or pirating illegitimately movie''s and music excluded.

--Tim
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
<http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20100207/e46bdd34/attachment.html>

Tim Cook <tim at cook.ms> writes:
> Kjetil Torgrim Homme <kjetilho at linpro.no> wrote:
>>    I don''t know what the J4500 drive sled contains, but for
the J4200
>>    and J4400 they need to include quite a bit of circuitry to handle
>>    SAS protocol all the way, for multipathing and to be able to
>>    accept a mix of SAS and SATA drives. ?it''s not just a piece
of
>>    sheet metal, some plastic and a LED.
>>
>>    the pricing does look strange, and I think it would be better to
>>    raise the price of the enclosure (which is silly cheap when empty
>>    IMHO) and reduce the drive prices somewhat. ?but that''s
just
>>    psychology, and doesn''t really matter for total cost.
>
> Why exactly would that be better?
people are looking at the price list and seeing that the J4200 costs
22550 NOK [1], while one sixpack of 2TB SATA disks to go with it costs
82500 NOK.  on the other hand you could get six 2TB SATA disks
(Ultrastars) from your friendly neighbourhood shop for 14370 NOK (7700
NOK for six Deskstars).  and to add insult to injury, the neighbourhood
shop offers five years warranty (required by Norwegian consumer laws),
compared to Sun''s three years...

everyone knows the price of a harddisk since they buy them for their
home computers.  do they know the price of a disk storage array?  not so
well.  yes, it''s a matter of perception for the buyer, but perception
can matter.
> Then it''s a high cost of entry.?  What if an SMB only needs 6
drives
> day one?? Why charge them an arm and a leg for the enclosure, and
> nothing for the drives?? Again, the idea is that you''re charging
based
> on capacity.
see my numbers above.  the chassis itself is just 12% of the cost (22%
when half full).  some middle ground could be found.

anyway, we''re buying these systems and are very happy with them.  when
disks fail, Sun replace them very expediently and with a minimum of
fuss.


[1] all prices include VAT to simplify comparison.  prices are current
from shop.sun.com and komplett.no.  Sun list prices are subject to
haggling.
-- 
Kjetil T. Homme
Redpill Linpro AS - Changing the game

On 2 feb 2010, at 16.26, David Dyer-Bennet wrote:
> I''m pretty doubtful that the hardware differs from what I can buy
from
> Newegg or whatever *IF* I buy the same enterprise-grade drive model (WD
> S25 or RE-4, say, rather than Caviar Blue) (I don''t know what WD
drives,
> if any, are currently qualified for use in any Sun products.)  Just to be
> clear, are you asserting that?  Or are you only asserting that the drives
> that get qualified are not the cheap drive models most easily found at
> your handy corner PC store?  (I have less trouble believing they might
> have non-standard microcode.)
I don''t know if this is true anymore, or even if it has ever been,
but I have read that after production the drives are classified
depending on surface quality, vibrations, heat from bearings and
other issues that could shorten service life.
The better drives are said to be sold to a higher price to those
who are willing to pay, like enterprise system manufacturers.
The mid class drives to partners/integrators/system manufacturers
that keep a track record and will stop buying from you if you
don''t keep up to some standards. The low class drives are sold
to the rest of us through the cheap channels.

Again, I don''t know if this is true anymore, or if it has ever
been. I maybe would have disregarded it as a silly rumor if it
wasn''t for the lower-quality, buggy, error-prone, data-loss-prone
firmware that they ship in the drives to the mass market.

I''d *love* to here the truth about this.

/ragge

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 1:58 PM, Tim Cook <tim at cook.ms> wrote:
>
> It''s called spreading the costs around.  Would you really rather
pay 10x
> the price on everything else besides the drives?  This is essentially
Sun''s
> way of tiered pricing.  Rather than charge you a software fee based on how
> much storage you have, they increase the price of the drives.  Seems fairly
> reasonable to me... it gives a low point of entry for people that
don''t need
> that much storage without using ridiculous capacity based licensing on
> software.
>

Smells like the Razor and Blades business model [1].

I think the industry is in a sad state when you buy enterprise-level drives
and they don''t work as expected (see that thread about TLER settings on
WD
enterprise drives) that you have to spend extra on drives that got reviewed
by a third-party (Sun/EMC/etc). Just shows how bad the disk vendors are.

I would be curious to know how the internal process of testing these drives
work at Sun/EMC/etc when they find bugs and performance problems. Do they
have access to the firmware''s source code to fix it ? Or do they report
the
bugs back to Seagate/WD and they provide a new firmware for tests ? Do those
bugs get fixed in other drives that Seagate/WD sells ?

For me it''s just hard to objectively point out the differences between
Seagate''s enterprise drives and the ones provided by Sun except that
they
were tested more.

1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebie_marketing

-- 
Giovanni
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
<http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20100208/3a14c3ae/attachment.html>

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 9:07 PM, Marc Nicholas <geekything at gmail.com>
wrote:
> I believe magical unicorn controllers and drives are both bug-free and
> 100% spec compliant. The leprichorns sell them if you''re trying to
> find them ;)
>
Well, "perfect" and "bug free" sure don''t exist in
our industry.

The problem is that we see disk firmwares that are stupidly flawed and the
revisions that get released aren''t making it better. Otherwise people
looking for quality would not have to spend extra on third-party reviewed
drives from storage vendors.

It''s all too convenient how the industry is organized. That is, for
disk and
storage vendors. Not customers.

-- 
Giovanni
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
<http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20100208/d9174b52/attachment.html>

On 2/8/10 12:49 AM -0200 Giovanni Tirloni wrote:
> I think the industry is in a sad state when you buy enterprise-level
> drives and they don''t work as expected (see that thread about TLER
> settings on WD enterprise drives) that you have to spend extra on drives
> that got reviewed by a third-party (Sun/EMC/etc). Just shows how bad the
> disk vendors are.
Or how tough the hard drive market is.

This is a long thread, with lots of interesting and valid observations
about the organisation of the industry,  the segmentation of the
market, getting what you pay for vs paying for what you want, etc.

I don''t really find within, however, an answer to the original
question, at least the way I read it.  Perhaps that''s the issue - that
the question was asked without enough specifics and context, and so
everyone has their own interpretation and their own answer to their
own question.

Remembering that a lot of this was branded and marketed as "open
storage", the desire to mix and match components is not only natural,
a clear expectation has been set that it should be possible and easy
and open.

That''s not to say that you can expect to have your cake and eat it
too.  Certain combinations and permutations are more qualified,
tested, supported and therefore expensive than others; these
characteristics are part of what you should be able to "mix and
match", understanding the full implications of each tradeoff choice.

Snorcle wants to sell hardware.  Sure, they want even more to sell a
complete hardware and annual maintenance package with annuity revenue
over multiple years with high markups.  Some people are simply not
customers for all of that, but might still be customers for the
hardware. Especially these days, it seems they still would want to
sell the hardware even when they can''t sell the rest of the package.

I read the following context between the lines of the original
question:
 - I have or can source disk drives I''m comfortable using.  
 - I understand that I''m not paying for, and can''t expect,
commercial
   support for whatever final combination I wind up with.
 - I am comfortable relying on standards and specifications for
   interoperability, enough that it''s unlikely I''ll have to
get into
   deep debugging for problems. At least, I''m unwilling or unable to
   pay high premiums ahead of time in the hope of avoiding potential
   high costs for later problems.
 - The J4500 seems like nice hardware, and I know that at least it
   isn''t likely to change unexpectedly to some different chipset not
   recognised by opensolaris, just before purchase.  This would give
   me some comfort. 
 - I like Sun, and am thankful for ZFS, and since I have to buy
   hardware anyway I''ll look at what Sun offers. Perhaps I would even
   prefer to buy the Sun offering, all else being approximately
   equal.  This would also give me some comfort.

In that context, I haven''t seen an answer, just a conclusion: 

 - All else is not equal, so I give my money to some other hardware
   manufacturer, and get frustrated that Sun "won''t let me"
buy the
   parts I could use effectively and comfortably.  

--
Dan.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 194 bytes
Desc: not available
URL:
<http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20100209/a9cf0503/attachment.bin>

Daniel Carosone <dan at geek.com.au> writes:
> In that context, I haven''t seen an answer, just a conclusion: 
>
>  - All else is not equal, so I give my money to some other hardware
>    manufacturer, and get frustrated that Sun "won''t let
me" buy the
>    parts I could use effectively and comfortably.  
no one is selling disk brackets without disks.  not Dell, not EMC, not
NetApp, not IBM, not HP, not Fujitsu, ...

-- 
Kjetil T. Homme
Redpill Linpro AS - Changing the game

Just like i said way earlier,  The entire idea is like asking to buy a
Ferrari  without the aluminum wheels they sell because you think they are
charging too much for them, after all, aluminum is cheap.
It''s just not done that way.  There are OTHER OPTIONS for people who
can''t
afford it.  You really can''t have both.  You can either afford it or
you
can''t.

On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 8:36 PM, Kjetil Torgrim Homme <kjetilho at
linpro.no>wrote:
> Daniel Carosone <dan at geek.com.au> writes:
>
> > In that context, I haven''t seen an answer, just a conclusion:
> >
> >  - All else is not equal, so I give my money to some other hardware
> >    manufacturer, and get frustrated that Sun "won''t let
me" buy the
> >    parts I could use effectively and comfortably.
>
> no one is selling disk brackets without disks.  not Dell, not EMC, not
> NetApp, not IBM, not HP, not Fujitsu, ...
>
> --
> Kjetil T. Homme
> Redpill Linpro AS - Changing the game
>
> _______________________________________________
> zfs-discuss mailing list
> zfs-discuss at opensolaris.org
> http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
<http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20100208/a9b251a7/attachment.html>

On Monday, February 8, 2010, Kjetil Torgrim Homme <kjetilho at linpro.no>
wrote:
> Daniel Carosone <dan at geek.com.au> writes:
>
>> In that context, I haven''t seen an answer, just a conclusion:
>>
>> ?- All else is not equal, so I give my money to some other hardware
>> ? ?manufacturer, and get frustrated that Sun "won''t let
me" buy the
>> ? ?parts I could use effectively and comfortably.
>
> no one is selling disk brackets without disks. ?not Dell, not EMC, not
> NetApp, not IBM, not HP, not Fujitsu, ...
>
> --
> Kjetil T. Homme
> Redpill Linpro AS - Changing the game
>
> _______________________________________________
> zfs-discuss mailing list
> zfs-discuss at opensolaris.org
> http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
>
Although I am in full support of what sun is doing, to play devils
advocate: supermicro is.

On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 9:13 PM, Tim Cook <tim at cook.ms> wrote:
> On Monday, February 8, 2010, Kjetil Torgrim Homme <kjetilho at
linpro.no>
> wrote:
> > Daniel Carosone <dan at geek.com.au> writes:
> >
> >> In that context, I haven''t seen an answer, just a
conclusion:
> >>
> >>  - All else is not equal, so I give my money to some other
hardware
> >>    manufacturer, and get frustrated that Sun "won''t
let me" buy the
> >>    parts I could use effectively and comfortably.
> >
> > no one is selling disk brackets without disks.  not Dell, not EMC, not
> > NetApp, not IBM, not HP, not Fujitsu, ...
> >
> > --
> > Kjetil T. Homme
> > Redpill Linpro AS - Changing the game
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > zfs-discuss mailing list
> > zfs-discuss at opensolaris.org
> > http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
> >
>
> Although I am in full support of what sun is doing, to play devils
> advocate: supermicro is.
>
>
This is a far cry from an apples to apples comparison though.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
<http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20100208/22f81600/attachment.html>

Tim Cook wrote:
> On Monday, February 8, 2010, Kjetil Torgrim Homme <kjetilho at
linpro.no> wrote:
>   
>> Daniel Carosone <dan at geek.com.au> writes:
>>
>>     
>>> In that context, I haven''t seen an answer, just a
conclusion:
>>>
>>>  - All else is not equal, so I give my money to some other hardware
>>>    manufacturer, and get frustrated that Sun "won''t
let me" buy the
>>>    parts I could use effectively and comfortably.
>>>       
>> no one is selling disk brackets without disks.  not Dell, not EMC, not
>> NetApp, not IBM, not HP, not Fujitsu, ..
> Although I am in full support of what sun is doing, to play devils
> advocate: supermicro is.
>   
True, but they''re not a systems vendor. They''re a parts OEM.  
You might
be able to get larger "integrated" solutions from them 
(motherboard/chassis together), but you''ll have to buy the rest of the 
parts yourself (or go to a system integrator to build a system for you).

No "brand-name" system provider allows you to purchase empty disk 
sleds.  About the best I can come up with on that is that eBay often has 
a selection of various brackets, usually from 3rd-parties which copy the 
Brand design.

In the end, you pay for support and integration testing. Whether it is 
worth it depends solely on your situation. But don''t expect vendors to 
service all (or even many) niches - they all pick their battles, and if 
you''re not in their zone, it''s a huge uphill struggle to get
them to add
your zone.  It''s that simple.


-- 
Erik Trimble
Java System Support
Mailstop:  usca22-123
Phone:  x17195
Santa Clara, CA

> > Although I am in full support of what sun is doing, to play devils
> > advocate: supermicro is.
They''re not the only ones, although the most-often discussed here.   

Dell will generally sell hardware and warranty and service add-ons in
any combination, to anyone willing and capable of figuring out what to
order, although that effort might well be more than the result is
worth.  Many of the others have issues in being further from the
retail market, such as support divisions that are only set up to deal
with large enterprise full-service customers. Nothing wrong with that
if it suits them.  

Of the others listed, Sun is the one promoting change and the benefits
of ZFS and open storage, and which has the opportunity to make sales
to an interested community.  They, too, are entitled to exclude
themselves from sales they don''t want, for whatever reason they or
their new masters choose. 

On Mon, Feb 08, 2010 at 09:33:12PM -0500, Thomas Burgess
wrote:
> This is a far cry from an apples to apples comparison though.
As much as I''m no fan of Apple, it''s a pity they dropped ZFS
because
that would have brought considerable attention to the opportunity of
marketing and offering zfs-suitable hardware to the consumer arena.
Port-multiplier boxes already seem to be targetted most at the Apple
crowd, even it''s only in hope of scoring a better margin. 

Otherwise, bad analogies, whether about cars or fruit, don''t help.

--
Dan.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 194 bytes
Desc: not available
URL:
<http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20100209/0057163f/attachment.bin>

> On Mon, Feb 08, 2010 at 09:33:12PM -0500, Thomas Burgess wrote:
> > This is a far cry from an apples to apples comparison though.
>
> As much as I''m no fan of Apple, it''s a pity they dropped
ZFS because
> that would have brought considerable attention to the opportunity of
> marketing and offering zfs-suitable hardware to the consumer arena.
> Port-multiplier boxes already seem to be targetted most at the Apple
> crowd, even it''s only in hope of scoring a better margin.
>
> Otherwise, bad analogies, whether about cars or fruit, don''t help.
>
>
It might help people to understand how ridiculous they sound going on and on
about buying a premium storage appliance without any storage.  I think the
car analogy was dead on.  You don''t have to agree with a vendors
practices
to understand them.  If you have a more fitting analogy, then by all means
lets hear it.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
<http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20100208/aa401287/attachment.html>

On 2/9/10 12:03 PM +1100 Daniel Carosone wrote:>
> Snorcle wants to sell hardware.
LOL ... snorcle

But apparently they don''t.  Have you seen the new website?   Seems like
a
blatant attempt to kill the hardware business to me.

On 9-Feb-10, at 2:02 PM, Frank Cusack wrote:
> On 2/9/10 12:03 PM +1100 Daniel Carosone wrote:>
>> Snorcle wants to sell hardware.
>
> LOL ... snorcle
>
> But apparently they don''t.  Have you seen the new website?   Seems
> like a
> blatant attempt to kill the hardware business to me.

That''s very sad. I love, love to spec the "rebooted"
Bechtolsheim
hardware designs.

--Toby

On Feb 8, 2010, at 20:03, Daniel Carosone wrote:
> Snorcle wants to sell hardware.
Larry Ellison wants Oracle to be a "systems" company, a la T. J.  
Watson Jr.''s IBM and Cisco:

"We are not going into the hardware business. We have no interest in  
the hardware business. We have a deep interest in the systems business."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmrxN3GWHpM#t=26m40s

On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 2:39 PM, Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au>
wrote:
>
> On 9-Feb-10, at 2:02 PM, Frank Cusack wrote:
>
>  On 2/9/10 12:03 PM +1100 Daniel Carosone wrote:>
>>
>>> Snorcle wants to sell hardware.
>>>
>>
>> LOL ... snorcle
>>
>> But apparently they don''t.  Have you seen the new website?  
Seems like a
>> blatant attempt to kill the hardware business to me.
>>
>
>
> That''s very sad. I love, love to spec the "rebooted"
Bechtolsheim hardware
> designs.
>
> --Toby
>
>
>
How do you figure that?  There are 5 columns on the front page:

Database
Middleware
Applications
Server and Storage Systems
Industry

How much more focus were you hoping for beyond front page status?  Were you
expecting them to remove all references to that little database thing that
their entire business is founded upon?

--Tim
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
<http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20100209/080388c3/attachment.html>

On 2/9/10 5:19 PM -0600 Tim Cook wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 2:39 PM, Toby Thain <toby at
telegraphics.com.au>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> On 9-Feb-10, at 2:02 PM, Frank Cusack wrote:
>>
>>  On 2/9/10 12:03 PM +1100 Daniel Carosone wrote:>
>>>
>>>> Snorcle wants to sell hardware.
>>>>
>>>
>>> LOL ... snorcle
>>>
>>> But apparently they don''t.  Have you seen the new website?
Seems like
>>> a blatant attempt to kill the hardware business to me.
>>>
>>
>>
>> That''s very sad. I love, love to spec the "rebooted"
Bechtolsheim
>> hardware designs.
>>
>> --Toby
>>
>>
>>
> How do you figure that?  There are 5 columns on the front page:
>
> Database
> Middleware
> Applications
> Server and Storage Systems
> Industry
>
> How much more focus were you hoping for beyond front page status?  Were
> you expecting them to remove all references to that little database thing
> that their entire business is founded upon?
I assume you are responding to my comment and not Toby''s.  Did you try
to drill down past the front page?  To look at the specs for ANY server?
I just thought it was much more difficult to look at and compare specs
than it was on Sun''s site.  Turns out you can go to shop.sun.com and
find the same tab interface as before though.

-frank

On Tue, 9 Feb 2010, Frank Cusack wrote:
>
> I assume you are responding to my comment and not Toby''s.  Did you
try
> to drill down past the front page?  To look at the specs for ANY server?
> I just thought it was much more difficult to look at and compare specs
> than it was on Sun''s site.  Turns out you can go to shop.sun.com
and
> find the same tab interface as before though.
Last time I tried this (last week) I was excited to finally run across 
the same tab interfaces.  I was interested in seeing the details on a 
server so I clicked on the specs tab and was directed to the same 
crappy Oracle product summary page which provides practically no 
useful information at all.

As a long-time devoted Sun customer who selects products based on web 
sites, I would not buy anything from Oracle until this gets fixed.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/

On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 7:37 PM, Frank Cusack <frank+lists/zfs at
linetwo.net>wrote:
>
> I assume you are responding to my comment and not Toby''s.  Did you
try
> to drill down past the front page?  To look at the specs for ANY server?
> I just thought it was much more difficult to look at and compare specs
> than it was on Sun''s site.  Turns out you can go to shop.sun.com
and
> find the same tab interface as before though.
>
> -frank
>

They''ve been merged for less than a week.  I expect Oracle still has
plenty
of work to do on the site.  Day 1 I found about 20 broken links, and
it''s
gotten much better since then.  I''d imagine there''s only so
much integration
they could do ahead of time.

--Tim
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
<http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20100209/4010de18/attachment.html>

On Tue, Feb  9 at  2:36, Kjetil Torgrim Homme wrote:
>Daniel Carosone <dan at geek.com.au> writes:
>
>> In that context, I haven''t seen an answer, just a conclusion:
>>
>>  - All else is not equal, so I give my money to some other hardware
>>    manufacturer, and get frustrated that Sun "won''t let
me" buy the
>>    parts I could use effectively and comfortably.
>
>no one is selling disk brackets without disks.  not Dell, not EMC, not
>NetApp, not IBM, not HP, not Fujitsu, ...
http://discountechnology.com/Products/SCSI-Hard-Drive-Caddies-Trays



-- 
Eric D. Mudama
edmudama at mail.bounceswoosh.org

"Eric D. Mudama" <edmudama at bounceswoosh.org>
writes:
> On Tue, Feb  9 at  2:36, Kjetil Torgrim Homme wrote:
>> no one is selling disk brackets without disks.  not Dell, not EMC,
>> not NetApp, not IBM, not HP, not Fujitsu, ...
>
> http://discountechnology.com/Products/SCSI-Hard-Drive-Caddies-Trays
very nice, thanks.  unfortunately it probably won''t last:

[http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2010-February/041335.html]:
|
| In the case of Dell''s PERC RAID controllers, we began informing
| customers when a non-Dell drive was detected with the introduction of
| PERC5 RAID controllers in early 2006. With the introduction of the
| PERC H700/H800 controllers, we began enabling only the use of Dell
| qualified drives.

-- 
Kjetil T. Homme
Redpill Linpro AS - Changing the game

On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 2:04 AM, Thomas Burgess <wonslung at gmail.com>
wrote:
>
> On Mon, Feb 08, 2010 at 09:33:12PM -0500, Thomas Burgess wrote:
>> > This is a far cry from an apples to apples comparison though.
>>
>> As much as I''m no fan of Apple, it''s a pity they
dropped ZFS because
>> that would have brought considerable attention to the opportunity of
>> marketing and offering zfs-suitable hardware to the consumer arena.
>> Port-multiplier boxes already seem to be targetted most at the Apple
>> crowd, even it''s only in hope of scoring a better margin.
>>
>> Otherwise, bad analogies, whether about cars or fruit, don''t
help.
>>
>>
> It might help people to understand how ridiculous they sound going on and
> on about buying a premium storage appliance without any storage.  I think
> the car analogy was dead on.  You don''t have to agree with a
vendors
> practices to understand them.  If you have a more fitting analogy, then by
> all means lets hear it.
>

Dell joins the party:
http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2010-February/041335.html

-- 
Giovanni
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
<http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20100210/1c07c06c/attachment.html>

On Tue, Feb 09, 2010 at 11:16:44PM -0700, Eric D. Mudama wrote:
> >no one is selling disk brackets without disks.  not Dell, not EMC, not
> >NetApp, not IBM, not HP, not Fujitsu, ...
> 
> http://discountechnology.com/Products/SCSI-Hard-Drive-Caddies-Trays
I don''t see why we have to hunt down random parts.

My lesson from this is that I no longer buy Sun, Dell, HP or Fujitsu.
Screw them. I can get complete systems with fully populated slots with
empty caddies e.g. from Supermicro. Drives are commodity. Same thing
with buying extra licenses to un-cripple IPMI crippleware (HP, Fujitsu). 

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE