illumos and ZFS days
Back in October I was pleased to attend — and my employer, Delphix, was pleased to sponsor — illumos day and ZFS day, run concurrently with Oracle Open World. Inspired by the success of dtrace.conf(12) in the Spring, the goal was to assemble developers, practitioners, and users of ZFS and illumos-derived distributions to educate, share [...]
In: illumos, ZFS · Tagged with: HSP, illumos, OpenSolaris, OracleSolaris, talk, ZFS
Flash news I wish I could read
For a short while, I ran the flash memory strategy at Sun and then Oracle, so I still keep my ear to the ground regarding flash news. That news is often frustratingly light — journalists in the space who are fully capable of providing analysis end up brushing the surface. With a tip of the [...]
In: Flash · Tagged with: Compellent, EMC, flash, HSP, NetApp, Oracle, SSD, Sun, TheRegister, ZFS
Another reason Apple misses ZFS
Apple recently announced a new iMac model — in itself, only as notable as the seasons — but with an interesting option: users can choose to have both an HDD and an SSD. Their use of these two is absolutely pedestrian, as noted on the Apple store: If you configure your iMac with both the [...]
In: ZFS · Tagged with: Apple, HSP, L2ARC, ZFS
ZIL analysis from Chris George
Chris George from DDRdrive put together a great presentation at the OpenStorage summit looking at the ZFS intent log (ZIL), and how their product is particularly well-suited as a ZIL device. Chris did a particularly interesting analysis of the I/O pattern ZFS generates to ZIL devices (using DTrace of course). With writes to a single [...]
In: ZFS · Tagged with: ChrisGeorge, DDRdrive, HSP, OpenStorageSummit, ZFS, ZIL
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
What is RAID-Z?
The mission of ZFS was to simplify storage and to construct an enterprise level of quality from volume components by building smarter software — indeed that notion is at the heart of the 7000 series. An important piece of that puzzle was eliminating the expensive RAID card used in traditional storage and replacing it with [...]
In: ZFS · Tagged with: Fishworks, HSP, JeffBonwick, RAID, RAID-Z, ZFS
Hybrid Storage Pools in CACM
As I mentioned in my previous post, I wrote an article about the hybrid storage pool (HSP); that article appears in the recently released July issue of Communications of the ACM. You can find it here. In the article, I talk about a novel way of augmenting the traditional storage stack with flash memory as [...]