Archive for the ‘Fishworks’ Category
Multiple pools in 2010.Q1
When the Sun Storage 7000 was first introduced, a key design decision was to allow only a single ZFS storage pool per host. This forces users to fully take advantage of the ZFS pool storage model, and prevents them from adopting ludicrous schemes such as “one pool per filesystem.” While RAID-Z has non-trivial performance implications [...]
Shadow Migration Internals
In my previous entry, I described the overall architecture of shadow migration. This post will dive into the details of how it’s actually implemented, and the motivation behind some of the original design decisions. VFS interposition A very early desire was that we wanted something that could migrate data from many different sources. And while [...]
User and Group Quotas in the 7000 Series
When ZFS was first developed, the engineering team had the notion that pooled storage would make filesystems cheap and plentiful, and we’d move away from the days of /export1, /export2, ad infinitum. From the ZFS perspective, they are cheap. It’s very easy to create dozens or hundreds of filesystems, each which functions as an administrative [...]
What is Shadow Migration?
In the Sun Storage 7000 2009.Q3 software release, one of the major new features I worked on was the addition of what we termed “shadow migration.” When we launched the product, there was no integrated way to migrate data from existing systems to the new systems. This resulted in customers rolling it by hand (rsync, [...]
Sun Storage 7210 Expansion
Last week, we announced the Sun Storage 7310 system. At the same time, a less significant but still notable change was made to the Sun Storage product line. The Sun Storage 7210 system is now expandable via J4500 JBODs. These JBODs have the same form factor as the 7210 – 48 drives in a top [...]
ZFS, FMA, hotplug, and Fishworks
In the past, I’ve discussed the evolution of disk FMA. Much has been accomplished in the past year, but there are still several gaps when it comes to ZFS and disk faults. In Solaris today, a fault diagnosed by ZFS (a device failing to open, too many I/O errors, etc) is reported as a pool [...]
Fishworks Storage Configuration
Since our initial product was going to be a NAS appliance, we knew early on that storage configuration would be a critical part of the initial Fishworks experience. Thanks to the power of ZFS storage pools, we have the ability to present a radically simplified interface, where the storage “just works” and the administrator doesn’t [...]
So how much work was it?
With any product, there is always some talk from the enthusiasts about how they could do it faster, cheaper, or simpler. Inevitably, there’s a little bit of truth to both sides. Enthusiasts have been doing homebrew NAS for as long as free software has been around, but it takes far more work to put together [...]
Fishworks Hardware Topology
It’s hard to believe that this day has finally come. After more than two and a half years, our first Fishworks-based product has been released. You can keep up to date with the latest info at the Fishworks blog. For my first technical post, I’d thought I’d give an introduction to the chassis subsystem at [...]