Archive for the ‘Fishworks’ Category
Hardware Engineer
Back at Fishworks, my colleagues had a nickname for me: Adam Leventhal, Hardware Engineer. I wasn’t designing hardware; I wasn’t even particularly more involved with hardware specs. The name referred to my preternatural ability to fit round pegs into square holes, to know when parts would bend but not break (or if they broke how [...]
In: Fishworks · Tagged with: AdamLeventhalHardwareEngineer, Hardware, iwashi, riverwalk, SSD, thumper
Leaving Oracle
I joined the Solaris Kernel Group in 2001 at what turned out to be a remarkable place and time for the industry. More by luck and intuition than by premonition, I found myself surrounded by superlative engineers working on revolutionary technologies that were the products of their own experience and imagination rather than managerial fiat. [...]
In: Fishworks · Tagged with: DTrace, Fishworks, Oracle, Solaris
Fishworks history of SSDs
This year’s flash memory summit got me thinking about our use of SSDs over the years at Fishworks. The picture of our left is a visual history of SSD evals in rough chronological order from the oldest at the bottom to the newest at the top (including some that have yet to see the light [...]
In: Fishworks · Tagged with: Fishworks, flash, HSP, Oracle, SSD, Sun, ZFS
2010.Q1 simulator
On the heels of the 2010.Q1 software release, we’ve provided a new version of the Sun Storage 7000 simulator that can be found at this new location. As noted previously, the simulator is a terrific way to take the Sun Storage 7000 user interface for a spin; it includes the exact same software as a [...]
The need for triple-parity RAID
When I first wrote about triple-parity RAID in ZFS and the Sun Storage 7000 series, I alluded a looming requirement for triple-parity RAID due to a growing disparity between disk capacity and throughput. I’ve written an article in ACM Queue examining this phenomenon in detail, and making the case for triple-parity RAID. Dominic Kay helped [...]
Logzillas: to mirror or stripe?
The Hybrid Storage Pool integrates flash into the storage hierarchy in two specific ways: as a massive read cache and as fast log devices. For read cache devices, Readzillas, there’s no need for redundant configurations; it’s a clean cache so the data necessarily also resides on disk. For log devices, Logzillas, redundancy is essential, but [...]
2009.Q3 Storage Configuration
Today we shipped our 2009.Q3 release. Amidst the many great new features, enhancements and bug fixes, we’ve added new storage profiles for triple-parity RAID and three-way mirroring. Here’s an example on a 9 JBOD system of what you’ll see in the updated storage configuration screen: Note that the new Triple parity RAID, wide stripes option [...]
Flash Memory Summit 2009
At the Flash Memory Summit today, Sun’s own Michael Cornwell delivered a keynote excoriating the overall direction of NAND flash and SSDs. In particular, he spoke of the “lithography death march” as NAND vendors push to deliver the most cost-efficient solution while making huge sacrifices in reliability and performance. On Wednesday, August 12, I’ll be [...]
Sun Storage 7310
Today we’re introducing a new member to the Sun Unified Storage family: the Sun Storage 7310. The 7310 is a scalable system from 12TB with a single half-populated J4400 JBOD up to 96TB with 4 JBODs. You can combine two 7310 head units to form a cluster. The base configuration includes a single quad-core CPU, [...]
Mirroring flash SSDs
As flash memory has become more and more prevalent in storage from the consumer to theenterprise people have been charmed by the performance characteristics, but get stuck on the longevity. SSDs based on SLC flash are typically rated at 100,000 to 1,000,000 write/erase cycles while MLC-based SSDs are rated for significantly less. For conventional hard [...]