zfs discuss - Apr 2010 - Are there (non-Sun/Oracle) vendors selling OpenSolaris/ZFS based NAS Hardware?

I''ve seen the Nexenta and EON webpages, but I''m not looking to
build my own.

Is there anything out there I can just buy?

 -Kyle

Install nexenta on a dell poweredge ?
or one of these http://www.pogolinux.com/products/storage_director

On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 9:48 PM, Kyle McDonald <kmcdonald at egenera.com>
wrote:
> I''ve seen the Nexenta and EON webpages, but I''m not
looking to build my
> own.
>
> Is there anything out there I can just buy?
>
>  -Kyle
>
> _______________________________________________
> zfs-discuss mailing list
> zfs-discuss at opensolaris.org
> http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
>
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Kyle McDonald writes:
> I''ve seen the Nexenta and EON webpages, but I''m not
looking to build my own.
>
> Is there anything out there I can just buy?
In Germany, someone sells preconfigured hardware based on Nexenta:

http://www.thomas-krenn.com/de/storage-loesungen/storage-systeme/nexentastor/nexentastor-sc846-unified-storage.html

I have no experience with them but I wish them success. :-)


Regards -- Volker
-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Volker A. Brandt                  Consulting and Support for Sun Solaris
Brandt & Brandt Computer GmbH                   WWW: http://www.bb-c.de/
Am Wiesenpfad 6, 53340 Meckenheim                     Email: vab at bb-c.de
Handelsregister: Amtsgericht Bonn, HRB 10513              Schuhgr??e: 45
Gesch?ftsf?hrer: Rainer J. H. Brandt und Volker A. Brandt

----- "Kyle McDonald" <kmcdonald at egenera.com>  skrev:
> I''ve seen the Nexenta and EON webpages, but I''m not
looking to build
> my own.
>
> Is there anything out there I can just buy?
I''ve setup a few systems with supermicro hardware - works well and
doesn''t cost a whole lot

roy

--
Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk
(+47) 97542685
roy at karlsbakk.net
http://blogg.karlsbakk.net/
--
I all pedagogikk er det essensielt at pensum presenteres intelligibelt. Det er
et element?rt imperativ for alle pedagoger ? unng? eksessiv anvendelse av
idiomer med fremmed opprinnelse. I de fleste tilfeller eksisterer adekvate og
relevante synonymer p? norsk.

> Install nexenta on a dell poweredge ??
> or one of these?http://www.pogolinux.com/products/storage_director
FYI; More recent poweredges (R410,R710, possibly blades too, those with
integrated Broadcom chips) are not working very well with opensolaris due
broadcom network issues, hang-ups packet loss etc.
And as opensolaris is not "supported" OS Dell is not interested to fix
these issues.

Yours
Markus Kovero

On Tue, Apr  6 at 13:03, Markus Kovero wrote:
>> Install nexenta on a dell poweredge ??
>> or one of these?http://www.pogolinux.com/products/storage_director
>FYI; More recent poweredges (R410,R710, possibly blades too, those with
integrated Broadcom chips) are not working very well with opensolaris due
broadcom network issues, hang-ups packet loss etc.
>And as opensolaris is not "supported" OS Dell is not interested to
fix these issues.
Our Dell T610 is and has been working just fine for the last year and
a half, without a single network problem.  Do you know if they''re
using the same integrated part?

--eric


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

> Our Dell T610 is and has been working just fine for the last year and
> a half, without a single network problem.  Do you know if they''re
> using the same integrated part?
> --eric
Hi, as I should have mentioned, integrated nics that cause issues are using
Broadcom BCM5709 chipset and these connectivity issues have been
quite widespread amongst linux people too, Redhat tries to fix this;
http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/docs/DOC-26837 but I believe it''s  messed
up in firmware somehow, as in our tests show 4.6.8-series firmware seems to be
more stable.
And what comes to workarounds, disabling msi is bad if it creates latency for
network/disk controllers and disabling c-states from Nehalem processors is just
stupid (having no turbo, power saving etc).

Definitely no go for storage imo.

Yours
Markus Kovero

Hi,

I also ran into the problem of Dell+Broadcom. I fixed it by downgrading
the firmware to version 4.xxx instead of running in version 5.xxx .
You may try that one as well.

Bruno

On 6-4-2010 16:54, Eric D. Mudama wrote:
> On Tue, Apr  6 at 13:03, Markus Kovero wrote:
>>> Install nexenta on a dell poweredge ? 
>>> or one of these http://www.pogolinux.com/products/storage_director
>> FYI; More recent poweredges (R410,R710, possibly blades too, those
>> with integrated Broadcom chips) are not working very well with
>> opensolaris due broadcom network issues, hang-ups packet loss etc.
>> And as opensolaris is not "supported" OS Dell is not
interested to
>> fix these issues.
>
> Our Dell T610 is and has been working just fine for the last year and
> a half, without a single network problem.  Do you know if they''re
> using the same integrated part?
>
> --eric
>
>

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Hmmm.. Tried to post this before, but it doesn''t appear. I''ll
try again.

I''ve been discussing the concept of a reference design for Opensolaris
systems with a few people. This comes very close to a system you can "just
buy".

I spent about six months burning up google and pestering people here about this
issue. In the end, I largely copied a system which someone (Constantin Gonzalez)
had blogged about here:
====================================================http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&ved=0CAYQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fblogs.sun.com%2Fconstantin%2Fentry%2Fa_small_and_energy_efficient&ei=bU-7S97KKY2gnQf25bytCA&usg=AFQjCNFhP99ZqaNZrhCOFgsLXHcumcVDOw
====================================================It was inexpensive for what
I got, and worked largely the first time I connected it up. It would make a good
reference design, excepting only that in the several weeks since I made it, the
motherboard has been discontinued by ASUS, although it''s still
available in many places.

A reference design is a setup that some knowing person or group has put together
and verified to work. It is later replicable by people of lesser skills with
little or no exposure to malfunction or long debugging.

Here''s the system I did:
ASUS M3A78-CM (about $60 when I got mine)
AMD Athlon II 240e ($70, the 240 is cheaper, but a few more watts)
Kingston 800MHz DDR2 unbuffered ECC ram, 2x 2GB ($80)
Syba PCIe x1 dual port SATA card ($26)
2x 40GB 2.5" SATA drives for mirrored boot pool ($52)
6x 750GB SATA drives for raidz2 storage pool, giving 4TB usable and 2-disk
failure immunity.
Case, power supply, cables, etc. to taste. I bought new, because I was looking
for a long-term reliable backup server, but used would work as well for lower
cost.

In spite of reported issues with the ethernet chipset on the mobo, it just
worked on my network, as installed. In fact, all of it just worked on install.
The driver test utility reported zero issues. USB worked. Keyboard, mouse, and
integrated video worked. So did the Syba card. No driver finagling.  Bring up
time was only extended by my not knowing which commands to type. That includes
making the remote console, remote desktop, and storage array available through
the network on my Windows XP email machine.

Now that I know what commands to type, it would take me less than an hour to set
another one up from unpacking the shipping boxes. The "knowing what
commands to type" took me a bit, but it''s not terribly taxing.
Most of it was finding the help sections on the web and in the Open Solaris
Bible and typing what I was told.

This would be a great candidate for a reference design except for Asus
discontinuing it. That will be the bane of reference designs like this. It
pretty much requires an ongoing effort of people assembling and documenting
their work as new motherboards flow through the system.

This is kind of what the HCL was probably intended to be, but does not measure
up to for a neophytes. The HCL for Solaris proper is much more usable in that it
seems to have a database back end and lets you select things, bringing up trees
of choices. Ah, well.

I think a local custom computer shop could replicate my server very quickly
indeed.

It''s not a "just buy and unwrap" but it''s remarkably
close.
-- 
This message posted from opensolaris.org

On Tue, Apr  6 at 17:56, Markus Kovero wrote:
>> Our Dell T610 is and has been working just fine for the last year and
>> a half, without a single network problem.  Do you know if
they''re
>> using the same integrated part?
>
>> --eric
>
> Hi, as I should have mentioned, integrated nics that cause issues
> are using Broadcom BCM5709 chipset and these connectivity issues
> have been quite widespread amongst linux people too, Redhat tries to
> fix this; http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/docs/DOC-26837 but I believe
> it''s messed up in firmware somehow, as in our tests show
> 4.6.8-series firmware seems to be more stable.
>
> And what comes to workarounds, disabling msi is bad if it creates
> latency for network/disk controllers and disabling c-states from
> Nehalem processors is just stupid (having no turbo, power saving
> etc).
>
> Definitely no go for storage imo.
Seems like this issue only occurs when MSI-X interrupts are enabled
for the BCM5709 chips, or am I reading it wrong?

If I type ''echo ::interrupts | mdb -k'', and isolate for
network-related bits, I get the following output:


  IRQ  Vect IPL Bus   Trg Type   CPU Share APIC/INT# ISR(s)
  36   0x60 6   PCI   Lvl Fixed  3   1     0x1/0x4   bnx_intr_1lvl
  48   0x61 6   PCI   Lvl Fixed  2   1     0x1/0x10  bnx_intr_1lvl


Does this imply that my system is not in a vulnerable configuration?
Supposedly i''m losing some performance without MSI-X, but I''m
not sure
in which environments or workloads we would notice since the load on
this server is relatively low, and the L2ARC serves data at greater
than 100MB/s (wire speed) without stressing much of anything.

The BIOS settings in our T610 are exactly as they arrived from Dell
when we bought it over a year ago.

Thoughts?
--eric

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

> Seems like this issue only occurs when MSI-X interrupts are enabled
> for the BCM5709 chips, or am I reading it wrong?
> 
> If I type ''echo ::interrupts | mdb -k'', and isolate for
> network-related bits, I get the following output:
>   IRQ  Vect IPL Bus   Trg Type   CPU Share APIC/INT# ISR(s)
>   36   0x60 6   PCI   Lvl Fixed  3   1     0x1/0x4   bnx_intr_1lvl
>   48   0x61 6   PCI   Lvl Fixed  2   1     0x1/0x10  bnx_intr_1lvl
> Does this imply that my system is not in a vulnerable configuration?
> Supposedly i''m losing some performance without MSI-X, but
I''m not sure
> in which environments or workloads we would notice since the load on
> this server is relatively low, and the L2ARC serves data at greater
> than 100MB/s (wire speed) without stressing much of anything.
> The BIOS settings in our T610 are exactly as they arrived from Dell
> when we bought it over a year ago.
> Thoughts?
> --eric
Unfortunately I see irq type "fixed" in system that suffers from
network issues with bnx. But yes, Regarding to redhat material this has
something to do with Nehalem c-states (power saving etc) and/or MSI.
If your system has been running for year or so, I wouldn''t expect this
issue to come up, we have noted this issue with R410/R710 mostly that are
manufactured in Q4/2009-Q1/2010 (different hw revisions?)

Yours
Markus Kovero

GreenBytes (USA) sells OpenSolaris based storage appliances
Web site: www.getgreenbytes.com
-- 
This message posted from opensolaris.org

On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 2:20 PM, Jeremy Archer <j4rch3r at gmail.com>
wrote:
> GreenBytes (USA) sells OpenSolaris based storage appliances
> Web site: www.getgreenbytes.com
>  <http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss>
>
Unless something has changed recently, they were using their own modified,
and non-open-source version of ZFS.

--Tim
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ONStor sells a ZFS based machine
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid5_gci1354658,00.html
It seems more like FreeNAS or something?
-- 
This message posted from opensolaris.org

On Apr 9, 2010, at 7:07 AM, Orvar Korvar wrote:
> ONStor sells a ZFS based machine
>
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid5_gci1354658,00.html
> It seems more like FreeNAS or something?
It doesn''t look like a ZFS-based product... too many limitations.  Also
LSI bought
the company last year.
http://www.lsi.com/storage_home/products_home/nas_gateways/index.html
 -- richard

ZFS storage and performance consulting at http://www.RichardElling.com
ZFS training on deduplication, NexentaStor, and NAS performance
Las Vegas, April 29-30, 2010 http://nexenta-vegas.eventbrite.com