Here''s the announcement for those new Sun JBOD devices mentioned the other day. http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2008-07/sunflash.20080709.1.xml ckl
On Wed, Jul 9, 2008 at 2:39 PM, Chad Lewis <Chad.Lewis at sun.com> wrote:> Here''s the announcement for those new Sun JBOD devices mentioned the > other day. > > http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2008-07/sunflash.20080709.1.xml > > ckl > > _______________________________________________ > zfs-discuss mailing list > zfs-discuss at opensolaris.org > http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss >So are these *tagged* drives/firmware? Do we have to buy them direct from Sun or can we throw anything we want at it? Does it come pre-loaded with real drive trays instead of useless blanks? --Tim -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20080709/d57f5be8/attachment.html>
On Wed, Jul 9, 2008 at 2:39 PM, Chad Lewis <Chad.Lewis at sun.com> wrote:> Here''s the announcement for those new Sun JBOD devices mentioned the > other day. > > http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2008-07/sunflash.20080709.1.xml > > ckl > > _______________________________________________ > zfs-discuss mailing list > zfs-discuss at opensolaris.org > http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss >Very interesting, I have two questions: Does this require tagged drives? IE: do we *HAVE* to purchase all drives that go into these direct from Sun? Does it ship with real drive trays in the *empty* slots, or those worthless blanks that won''t hold a drive? --Tim -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20080709/5e4291c6/attachment.html>
Heh, I like the way you think Tim. I''m sure Sun hate people like us. The first thing I tested when I had an x4500 on trial was to make sure an off the shelf 1TB disk worked in it :) This message posted from opensolaris.org
.. And the answer was yes I hope. we are sriously thinking of buying 48 1 tb disk to replace those in a 1 year old thumper.... please confirm it again :) 2008/7/10, Ross <myxiplx at hotmail.com>:> Heh, I like the way you think Tim. I''m sure Sun hate people like us. The > first thing I tested when I had an x4500 on trial was to make sure an off > the shelf 1TB disk worked in it :) > > > This message posted from opensolaris.org > _______________________________________________ > zfs-discuss mailing list > zfs-discuss at opensolaris.org > http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss >-- Tommaso Boccali INFN Pisa
Tommaso Boccali wrote:> .. And the answer was yes I hope. we are sriously thinking of buying > 48 1 tb disk to replace those in a 1 year old thumper.... > > please confirm it again :) > >In my 15 year experience with Sun Products, I''ve never known one to care about drive brand, model, or firmware. If it was standards compliant for both physical interface, and protocol the machine would use it in my experience. This was mainly with host attached JBOD though (which the x4500 and x4540 are.) In RAID arrays my guess is that it wouldn''t care then either, though you''d be opening yourself up to wierd interactions between the array and the drive firmware if you didn''t use a tested combination. The drive carriers were a different story though. Some were easy to get. Others extrememly hard. There was one carrier that we couldn''t get separately even when I worked at Sun. -kyle
Yup, worked fine. We removed a 500GB disk and replaced it with a 1TB one, didn''t even need any downtime (although you have to be quick with the screwdriver). I spoke to the x64 line product manager last year and they confirmed that Sun plan to support 2TB drives, and probably even 4TB drives as they''re released. I bought a spare drive bay with the latest x2200 we bought since they look to be the same type of mount. When we do finally buy a Thumper I''m planning to have a few spare bays so we can upgrade 4 disks at a time. Now I''m very new to Solaris, so I don''t know if this is really the best procedure, but this is the best way I found to upgrade the drives on the x4500: Upgrading Drives Use the procedure for replacing a failed drive with a slight modification. When a drive is replaced with a hot spare, ZFS sees that as a temporary change, and will revert back to the original drive once it has been replaced. If you are upgrading, it''s more efficient to make the swop permanent. ie: old drive -> new drive Instead of: old drive -> spare -> new drive Overview: Remove a spare from the ZFS pool Use the cfgadm program as documented below to replace the spare with a bigger drive Replace a drive in the ZFS pool with the new large drive Then offline that drive, and repeat 1. Remove the spare and upgrade it # zpool remove <poolname> c5t7d0 # cfgadm | grep c5t7d0 sata1/1::dsk/c5t7d0 disk connected configured ok # cfgadm -c unconfigure sata1/1Now remove and replace the physical disk 2. Start the rolling replacements: # cfgadm -c configure sata1/1 # zpool replace <poolname> <olddrive> c5t7d0 ... wait # cfgadm | grep <olddrive> sata1/2::dsk/<olddrive> disk connected configured ok # cfgadm -c unconfigure sata1/2Replace that drive and repeat. This message posted from opensolaris.org
Kyle McDonald wrote:> Tommaso Boccali wrote: > >> .. And the answer was yes I hope. we are sriously thinking of buying >> 48 1 tb disk to replace those in a 1 year old thumper.... >> >> please confirm it again :) >> >> >> > In my 15 year experience with Sun Products, I''ve never known one to care > about drive brand, model, or firmware. If it was standards compliant for > both physical interface, and protocol the machine would use it in my > experience. This was mainly with host attached JBOD though (which the > x4500 and x4540 are.) In RAID arrays my guess is that it wouldn''t care > then either, though you''d be opening yourself up to wierd interactions > between the array and the drive firmware if you didn''t use a tested > combination. >In general, yes, industry standard drives should be industry standard. We do favor the enterprise-class drives, mostly because they are lower cost over time -- it costs real $$ to answer the phone for a field replacement request. Usually, there is a Sun-specific label because though we source from many vendors and products like hardware RAID controllers get upset when the replacement disk reports a different size.> The drive carriers were a different story though. Some were easy to get. > Others extrememly hard. There was one carrier that we couldn''t get > separately even when I worked at Sun. >Drive carriers are a different ballgame. AFAIK, there is no industry standard carrier that meets our needs. We require service LEDs for many of our modern disk carriers, so there is a little bit of extra electronics there. You will see more electronics for some of the newer products as I explain here: http://blogs.sun.com/relling/entry/this_ain_t_your_daddy I won''t get into the "support" issue... it hurts my brain. -- richard
On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 12:14, Richard Elling <Richard.Elling at sun.com> wrote:> Drive carriers are a different ballgame. AFAIK, there is no > industry standard carrier that meets our needs. We require > service LEDs for many of our modern disk carriers, so there > is a little bit of extra electronics there. You will see more > electronics for some of the newer products as I explain here: > http://blogs.sun.com/relling/entry/this_ain_t_your_daddyWhile I do appreciate the need for redundancy, and thus interposers, I wish Sun''s pricing on the disk/interposer combinations were a little more aggressive. Here''s current costs straight from Sun''s site: XTA-ST1NJ-250G7K $ 170.00 250GB XTA-ST1NJ-500G7K $ 400.00 500GB XTA-ST1NJ-750G7K $ 525.00 750GB XTA-ST1NJ-1T7K $ 950.00 1000GB Compare for a moment with prices for raw disks (Seagate NS series, from ZipZoomFly; I picked these because they look an awful lot like what I got when I bought disks from Sun): ST3250310NS $70 250GB ST3500320NS $100 500GB ST3750330NS $150 750GB ST31000340NS $235 1000GB So for a 250 gig drive the interposer and caddy etc cost me $100, for a 500 gb disk it costs me $300, for a 750 it costs $375, and for 1TB disks it costs an extra $715! Look at it another way - if I buy a 250GB disk from Sun and a 1TB disk of my own for the prices above, it costs me $405, less than half what buying a 1TB disk from Sun would cost. I can buy two of those assemblies for less than one from Sun, and leave one as a cold spare. Another way to look at it: Suppose that Sun charges a flat $100 for the extra electronics. Then the 250GB disk is priced at market value, the 500 at three times market, the 750 at 2.8 times market, and the 1TB at 3.6 times market. If the prices on disks were lower on these, they would be interesting for low-end businesses or even high-end home users. The chassis is within reach of reasonable, but the disk prices look ludicrously high from where I sit. An empty one only costs $3k, sure, but fill it with twelve disks and it''s up to $20k. Are there some extra electronics required for larger disks that help explain this steep slope of cost? I can''t think of any reasons off the top of my head (other than the understandable profit motive). Will
On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 4:13 PM, Kyle McDonald <KMcDonald at egenera.com> wrote:> In my 15 year experience with Sun Products, I''ve never known one to care > about drive brand, model, or firmware. If it was standards compliant for > both physical interface, and protocol the machine would use it in my > experience. This was mainly with host attached JBOD though (which the > x4500 and x4540 are.) In RAID arrays my guess is that it wouldn''t care > then either, though you''d be opening yourself up to wierd interactions > between the array and the drive firmware if you didn''t use a tested > combination.My experience with RAID arrays (mostly Sun''s) has been that they''re incredibly picky about the drives they talk to, firmware in particular. You pretty much have to have one of the few supported configurations for it to work. If you''re lucky the array will update the firmware for you. I''ve also seen the intelligent controllers in some of Sun''s JBOD units (the S1, and the 3000 series) fail to recognize drives that work perfectly well elsewhere. I''m slightly disappointed that there wasn''t a model for 2.5 inch drives in there, though. -- -Peter Tribble http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
Will Murnane wrote:> On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 12:14, Richard Elling <Richard.Elling at sun.com> wrote: > >> Drive carriers are a different ballgame. AFAIK, there is no >> industry standard carrier that meets our needs. We require >> service LEDs for many of our modern disk carriers, so there >> is a little bit of extra electronics there. You will see more >> electronics for some of the newer products as I explain here: >> http://blogs.sun.com/relling/entry/this_ain_t_your_daddy >> > While I do appreciate the need for redundancy, and thus interposers, I > wish Sun''s pricing on the disk/interposer combinations were a little > more aggressive. Here''s current costs straight from Sun''s site: > XTA-ST1NJ-250G7K $ 170.00 250GB > XTA-ST1NJ-500G7K $ 400.00 500GB > XTA-ST1NJ-750G7K $ 525.00 750GB > XTA-ST1NJ-1T7K $ 950.00 1000GB > Compare for a moment with prices for raw disks (Seagate NS series, > from ZipZoomFly; I picked these because they look an awful lot like > what I got when I bought disks from Sun): > ST3250310NS $70 250GB > ST3500320NS $100 500GB > ST3750330NS $150 750GB > ST31000340NS $235 1000GB > So for a 250 gig drive the interposer and caddy etc cost me $100, for > a 500 gb disk it costs me $300, for a 750 it costs $375, and for 1TB > disks it costs an extra $715! Look at it another way - if I buy a > 250GB disk from Sun and a 1TB disk of my own for the prices above, it > costs me $405, less than half what buying a 1TB disk from Sun would > cost. I can buy two of those assemblies for less than one from Sun, > and leave one as a cold spare. > > Another way to look at it: Suppose that Sun charges a flat $100 for > the extra electronics. Then the 250GB disk is priced at market value, > the 500 at three times market, the 750 at 2.8 times market, and the > 1TB at 3.6 times market. > > If the prices on disks were lower on these, they would be interesting > for low-end businesses or even high-end home users. The chassis is > within reach of reasonable, but the disk prices look ludicrously high > from where I sit. An empty one only costs $3k, sure, but fill it with > twelve disks and it''s up to $20k. Are there some extra electronics > required for larger disks that help explain this steep slope of cost? > I can''t think of any reasons off the top of my head (other than the > understandable profit motive). >Never confuse price with cost. Price is set by market forces. -- richard
Yes, but pricing that''s so obviously disconnected with cost leads customers to feel they''re being ripped off. This message posted from opensolaris.org
On Thu, 10 Jul 2008, Ross wrote:> Yes, but pricing that''s so obviously disconnected with cost leads > customers to feel they''re being ripped off.It has been common since the dawn of time for there to often be little relationship between cost and price. An excellent example of this is the long distance telephone system. If you call on your POTS line, the call may cost $10 but if you call using your cell phone, the call is free. You are free to select products from a different vendor. Sun''s pricing likely reflects the high cost of product development, warranty, service, and quality control. Usually the "cheap" vendors are lacking in one or all of these areas. Not everyone can afford Cadillac, BMW, Porche, Mercedes, or Lexus so they pay half as much for a lesser brand. Bob =====================================Bob Friesenhahn bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
>>>>> "bf" == Bob Friesenhahn <bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us> writes:bf> since the dawn of time since the dawn of time Sun has been playing these games with hard drive ``sleds''''. I still have sparc32 stuff on the shelf with missing/extra sleds. bf> POTS line bf> cell phone bf> You are free to select products from a different vendor. what? So, this means he *shouldn''t* feel like he''s being ripped off if he buys from Sun? <blinks> bf> Sun''s pricing likely reflects the high cost of product bf> development, warranty, service, and quality control. You are talking about cost here, but the pricing reflects ``market forces''''. The blog makes it sound like Sun engineers have come up with this sneaky plan to achieve a certain tier of reliability at a tier below in cost, but what they really mean by low cost is, low cost _to Sun_, not to customers. The price you pay is determined by what other vendors charge for the same tier of reliability---knowing this, while reading the blog you would already be thinking, ``oh fantastic, a tiny ~$10 chip and a plastic carrier that''s practically free, but has incredible market value. They''ve come up with a scheme for ripping me off. What smooth and adept capitalists they are! What merit, what admiration I have for their schemes! too bad it helps them, not me.'''' If you''re a stockholder, get excited about the blogs, but for customers, without Sun''s price list and their competitors'' price lists in front of you, there''s apparently not much point in discussing anything (except maybe, whether we can swap drives out of the tray and have the thing still work or whether there is some ``sled DRM'''' in the closed-source LSI Logic SATA driver, and how much we save by not buying a support contract which I assume is pointless after said swapping). -------------- 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/20080711/810fce64/attachment.bin>
Will Murnane wrote:> If the prices on disks were lower on these, they would be interesting > for low-end businesses or even high-end home users. The chassis is > within reach of reasonable, but the disk prices look ludicrously high > from where I sit. An empty one only costs $3k, sure, but fill it with > twelve disks and it''s up to $20k. Are there some extra electronics > required for larger disks that help explain this steep slope of cost? > I can''t think of any reasons off the top of my head (other than the > understandable profit motive). > >I guess most large customers only compare storage costs against other storage vendors. Most shops I''ve worked with only buy fully populated shelves and none of them pay list! Ian
The admin user doesn''t have any access to customer data; just could kill off sessions, etc. --- World-class email, DNS, web- and app-hosting services, www.concentric.com . On Jul 11, 2008, at 2:05 PM, Ian Collins wrote:> Will Murnane wrote: >> If the prices on disks were lower on these, they would be interesting >> for low-end businesses or even high-end home users. The chassis is >> within reach of reasonable, but the disk prices look ludicrously high >> from where I sit. An empty one only costs $3k, sure, but fill it >> with >> twelve disks and it''s up to $20k. Are there some extra electronics >> required for larger disks that help explain this steep slope of cost? >> I can''t think of any reasons off the top of my head (other than the >> understandable profit motive). >> >> > I guess most large customers only compare storage costs against other > storage vendors. Most shops I''ve worked with only buy fully populated > shelves and none of them pay list! > > Ian > > _______________________________________________ > zfs-discuss mailing list > zfs-discuss at opensolaris.org > http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
20k list gets you into a decked out storevault with FCP/iSCSI/NFS... For being "just a jbod" this thing is ridiculously overpriced, sorry. I''m normally the first one to defend Sun when it come to decisions made due to an enterprise customer base, but this will not be one of those situations. On Fri, Jul 11, 2008 at 4:05 PM, Ian Collins <ian at ianshome.com> wrote:> Will Murnane wrote: > > If the prices on disks were lower on these, they would be interesting > > for low-end businesses or even high-end home users. The chassis is > > within reach of reasonable, but the disk prices look ludicrously high > > from where I sit. An empty one only costs $3k, sure, but fill it with > > twelve disks and it''s up to $20k. Are there some extra electronics > > required for larger disks that help explain this steep slope of cost? > > I can''t think of any reasons off the top of my head (other than the > > understandable profit motive). > > > > > I guess most large customers only compare storage costs against other > storage vendors. Most shops I''ve worked with only buy fully populated > shelves and none of them pay list! > > Ian > > _______________________________________________ > 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/20080711/60348b89/attachment.html>
On Fri, 11 Jul 2008, Tim wrote:> 20k list gets you into a decked out storevault with FCP/iSCSI/NFS... For > being "just a jbod" this thing is ridiculously overpriced, sorry. > > I''m normally the first one to defend Sun when it come to decisions made due > to an enterprise customer base, but this will not be one of those > situations.You are not required to purchase a Sun product. Just purchase a similar IBM or Adaptec JBOD product. They will work fine with ZFS. If Sun''s product is over-priced, they will find out soon enough and adjust their prices. It may be that Sun initially sets the prices very high so that after they start shipping they can reduce the price and advertise the new bargian. Bob =====================================Bob Friesenhahn bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
Tim wrote:> On Fri, Jul 11, 2008 at 4:05 PM, Ian Collins <ian at ianshome.com > <mailto:ian at ianshome.com>> wrote: > > Will Murnane wrote: > > If the prices on disks were lower on these, they would be > interesting > > for low-end businesses or even high-end home users. The chassis is > > within reach of reasonable, but the disk prices look ludicrously > high > > from where I sit. An empty one only costs $3k, sure, but fill > it with > > twelve disks and it''s up to $20k. Are there some extra electronics > > required for larger disks that help explain this steep slope of > cost? > > I can''t think of any reasons off the top of my head (other than the > > understandable profit motive). > > > > > I guess most large customers only compare storage costs against other > storage vendors. Most shops I''ve worked with only buy fully populated > shelves and none of them pay list! > > 20k list gets you into a decked out storevault with FCP/iSCSI/NFS... > For being "just a jbod" this thing is ridiculously overpriced, sorry. > > I''m normally the first one to defend Sun when it come to decisions > made due to an enterprise customer base, but this will not be one of > those situations.OK, one client of mine has just installed an IBM DS3200 shelf. Pop over to IBM''s site (http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/storage/disk/ds3000/ds3200/browse.html) and compare prices with a J4200. For starters, the IBM sourced 1TB drives are $249 more... Ian