ZFS to the rescue
David Orman just posted a success story on how Solaris ZFS solved a problem that would have been almost insurmountable in the OpenSource world before ZFS, and extremely costly and complex even if you could just write a check and have a ready made solution. And he did it in just 6 hours…
I’m copying it here because it hasn’t reached opensolaris.org content-discuss yet.
PS - I need to make clear now before a lot of time gets invested that we are still in the evaluation phase of a _lot_ of things. We are truly a "fledgling" data center as described on our site. There are a lot of things still being ironed out. My facility is still far from being finished! We're just trying to start with the right technology from the beginning, and design our environment around the "stuff" that makes everything go. Not try to shoehorn the "stuff" into a poorly designed environment. We've got a 12,000 sq foot underground facility, all concrete walls. We're building it out by ourselves, and with funding from our day-jobs. We don't have millions of dollars, we don't have paid construction workers. Everything from sandblasting to demolition to engineering (electrical, structural, you name it) we are doing in-house.
I'm a 24 year old college graduate from Dallas, I moved to Hawaii with the goal of starting a data center, as on a trip here prior to my graduation, I saw there really wasn't much in that sector in this area. Our only decent sized competitor is full, and turning away customers. The other two competitors are priced insanely high. Bandwidth is expensive in Hawaii, but not _that_ expensive.
Most of the companies around here have "old" technology. Most do not have backup locations. The pre-existing data center owned by Equinix here is at/below sea level, right next to the airport. Etc etc. Just giving some background on the logic behind my coming out here.
We've been in touch with a lot of potential customers (the City and County of Honolulu is coming out in April) .. I've got a very interesting auditor report on their main data center. You'll love the indoor rain gutters and "paper towel water detection system" they use in the walls.
Needless to say, we've gotten a LOT of interest in our services since our publication in Pacific Business Journal. Now we're working on figuring out what we want to base all of our services on. I will go more into my exposure to Solaris/Sun later, but needless to say I ended up exploring Sun as an option. It didn't take long to very quickly realize I had something good in my hands. We've evaluated Linux (various distros), FreeBSD, and now Solaris (still in evaluation.. actually.. I'm just playing and having fun like a little kid!) Linux was turned down due to pricey support and generally ad-hoc thrown-together design (from my standpoint), as well as performance issues. It "felt" like using a duct-tape solution, not something industrial grade. That might be fine when you're running a cluster and have designed failover, but that really isn't that efficient in power/heat production. As I'm sure most of you are aware, that is the largest cost a data center has, electricity. PS - I am keeping this very short/abridged, more details can be provided
as needed.
FreeBSD was fairly nice. This was to be our final solution, until I decided to try out Solaris. I never really had any issues with it, it seemed more "put together" and I felt a lot more secure using it as our primary OS. We were running a solution for our needs with apache/ mysql/pgsql/postfix/dovecot/proftp. It was a pretty nasty little combination, but it worked well enough for our needs. (As a side note, we are about to start evaluating JES. My initial experience with it was terrible too, but I'm told once you wrap your head around it, it's really nice.)
I then had a client come and ask me (in the past few weeks) for a backup solution price quote. I said sure, his IT guy got in contact with me and provided me requirements. 25 gigs initial storage, and growth of about 5-10 gigs a month. The thing is, they wanted daily backups for a week, weekly backups for a month, monthly backups for a year.. I got a slight headache at this point, as the client made it quite clear he was looking for an inexpensive but reliable solution. I was then informed he had a business DSL connection. Another big uh-oh. _Then_ I was informed (here's the bomb) they wanted full backups, because they wanted to easily be able to retrieve any day/week/month/ etc worth of files at any time, without *our* (my company's) intervention. I was nearly in tears trying to think of a solution that could do all of these things, and not cost the client thousands a month.
That is when it dawned on me. That cool Sun feature slated for Solaris 10! What's it called? Oh yeah, ZFS. I think I remember something called snapshots, let me give it a go!
What followed was about two weeks of tears trying to build a machine that would run Solaris (and not drop from the network every ten minutes.) As I said, we're funding every aspect of a data center from our pockets, blood sweat and tears, working day jobs. needless to say, buying Sun gear was not an option for us without the assurance of a customer's pay coming in. We also did not want to take the "try a coolthreads server free for 60 days" deal, because we felt it wouldn't be fair to Sun for us to take a trial if we had absolutely no idea if it would even work for us. At the same time, we needed something to try out this fancy new ZFS filesystem. After managing to source parts that would work with Solaris (no easy feat here in Hawaii!) and getting b33 of Nevada installed, I was blown away.
I needed help getting things working properly, but *without a support contract* and running on *completely unsupported off the shelf hardware* - to my amazement, Sun engineers responded to simple and basic (ignorant) mailing list posts I made. I got clear concise answers to my problems, and quite quickly! Within a day, I had the client's solution already proven technically feasible, and not only that, but INEXPENSIVELY and RELIABLY. Want backups from 03/15/06? No problem, just browse to .zfs/snapshot/031506/ and you're there. Grab whatever you need. Have fun!
Us? Not wasting a ton of storage on full backups of that amount of data. Sleeping soundly at night not worrying about the data being safe. Very little equipment to manage/run the system, so low power costs. Capability to grow to as much storage as needed. Best of all, very little time invested! Literally, from question to solution, removing all time required to evaluate other solutions and source parts, was no more than 6 hours. This coming from a guy who never used Solaris before the past few months. ZFS is so intuitive, it was like a breath of fresh air. Sun engineers filled my mailbox with tips, hints, suggestions, explanations. Even suggestions on drive cages! Who do you think my first server purchase will be from? You got it - Sun. As soon as things are ironed out with this customer, we'll be picking up a nice Sun server to top that drive cage and export the ZFS share via NFS. Possibly another Sun server to handle the frontend operations. It all depends on budget, of course! This is just the start, just the core, of what we plan for the future. It's just a few days of my life, and my eye-opening to Sun.
Don't even get me started on Niagra. We're looking at that now too, and realizing with the savings we'll have in power and space, we'll be competitive in price with data centers were never thought we could be, due to high bandwidth pricing in Hawaii.
Not only that, but we'll be able to offer solutions nobody else can here, due to all of the innovative technologies in Solaris 10. We're starting clean, we can implement everything around the solution that best fits us. From the looks of things, that solution is Sun, and we're building our data center around that core. :)
Cheers,
David
PS - This was just to give some background, I didn't write it with
the intention of it being used directly. I can write up something
more formal and concise as needed. I just thought it'd be nice to
share a little more into where we stand, where we are going, and why
Sun looks like our best option to get there. I'll let you all take
the ball and roll it around for a bit. Feel free to shoot back any
questions, suggestions, feedback - anything. I'm here to provide
anything I can. :)
I’m copying it here because it hasn’t reached opensolaris.org content-discuss yet.
PS - I need to make clear now before a lot of time gets invested that we are still in the evaluation phase of a _lot_ of things. We are truly a "fledgling" data center as described on our site. There are a lot of things still being ironed out. My facility is still far from being finished! We're just trying to start with the right technology from the beginning, and design our environment around the "stuff" that makes everything go. Not try to shoehorn the "stuff" into a poorly designed environment. We've got a 12,000 sq foot underground facility, all concrete walls. We're building it out by ourselves, and with funding from our day-jobs. We don't have millions of dollars, we don't have paid construction workers. Everything from sandblasting to demolition to engineering (electrical, structural, you name it) we are doing in-house.
I'm a 24 year old college graduate from Dallas, I moved to Hawaii with the goal of starting a data center, as on a trip here prior to my graduation, I saw there really wasn't much in that sector in this area. Our only decent sized competitor is full, and turning away customers. The other two competitors are priced insanely high. Bandwidth is expensive in Hawaii, but not _that_ expensive.
Most of the companies around here have "old" technology. Most do not have backup locations. The pre-existing data center owned by Equinix here is at/below sea level, right next to the airport. Etc etc. Just giving some background on the logic behind my coming out here.
We've been in touch with a lot of potential customers (the City and County of Honolulu is coming out in April) .. I've got a very interesting auditor report on their main data center. You'll love the indoor rain gutters and "paper towel water detection system" they use in the walls.
Needless to say, we've gotten a LOT of interest in our services since our publication in Pacific Business Journal. Now we're working on figuring out what we want to base all of our services on. I will go more into my exposure to Solaris/Sun later, but needless to say I ended up exploring Sun as an option. It didn't take long to very quickly realize I had something good in my hands. We've evaluated Linux (various distros), FreeBSD, and now Solaris (still in evaluation.. actually.. I'm just playing and having fun like a little kid!) Linux was turned down due to pricey support and generally ad-hoc thrown-together design (from my standpoint), as well as performance issues. It "felt" like using a duct-tape solution, not something industrial grade. That might be fine when you're running a cluster and have designed failover, but that really isn't that efficient in power/heat production. As I'm sure most of you are aware, that is the largest cost a data center has, electricity. PS - I am keeping this very short/abridged, more details can be provided
as needed.
FreeBSD was fairly nice. This was to be our final solution, until I decided to try out Solaris. I never really had any issues with it, it seemed more "put together" and I felt a lot more secure using it as our primary OS. We were running a solution for our needs with apache/ mysql/pgsql/postfix/dovecot/proftp. It was a pretty nasty little combination, but it worked well enough for our needs. (As a side note, we are about to start evaluating JES. My initial experience with it was terrible too, but I'm told once you wrap your head around it, it's really nice.)
I then had a client come and ask me (in the past few weeks) for a backup solution price quote. I said sure, his IT guy got in contact with me and provided me requirements. 25 gigs initial storage, and growth of about 5-10 gigs a month. The thing is, they wanted daily backups for a week, weekly backups for a month, monthly backups for a year.. I got a slight headache at this point, as the client made it quite clear he was looking for an inexpensive but reliable solution. I was then informed he had a business DSL connection. Another big uh-oh. _Then_ I was informed (here's the bomb) they wanted full backups, because they wanted to easily be able to retrieve any day/week/month/ etc worth of files at any time, without *our* (my company's) intervention. I was nearly in tears trying to think of a solution that could do all of these things, and not cost the client thousands a month.
That is when it dawned on me. That cool Sun feature slated for Solaris 10! What's it called? Oh yeah, ZFS. I think I remember something called snapshots, let me give it a go!
What followed was about two weeks of tears trying to build a machine that would run Solaris (and not drop from the network every ten minutes.) As I said, we're funding every aspect of a data center from our pockets, blood sweat and tears, working day jobs. needless to say, buying Sun gear was not an option for us without the assurance of a customer's pay coming in. We also did not want to take the "try a coolthreads server free for 60 days" deal, because we felt it wouldn't be fair to Sun for us to take a trial if we had absolutely no idea if it would even work for us. At the same time, we needed something to try out this fancy new ZFS filesystem. After managing to source parts that would work with Solaris (no easy feat here in Hawaii!) and getting b33 of Nevada installed, I was blown away.
I needed help getting things working properly, but *without a support contract* and running on *completely unsupported off the shelf hardware* - to my amazement, Sun engineers responded to simple and basic (ignorant) mailing list posts I made. I got clear concise answers to my problems, and quite quickly! Within a day, I had the client's solution already proven technically feasible, and not only that, but INEXPENSIVELY and RELIABLY. Want backups from 03/15/06? No problem, just browse to .zfs/snapshot/031506/ and you're there. Grab whatever you need. Have fun!
Us? Not wasting a ton of storage on full backups of that amount of data. Sleeping soundly at night not worrying about the data being safe. Very little equipment to manage/run the system, so low power costs. Capability to grow to as much storage as needed. Best of all, very little time invested! Literally, from question to solution, removing all time required to evaluate other solutions and source parts, was no more than 6 hours. This coming from a guy who never used Solaris before the past few months. ZFS is so intuitive, it was like a breath of fresh air. Sun engineers filled my mailbox with tips, hints, suggestions, explanations. Even suggestions on drive cages! Who do you think my first server purchase will be from? You got it - Sun. As soon as things are ironed out with this customer, we'll be picking up a nice Sun server to top that drive cage and export the ZFS share via NFS. Possibly another Sun server to handle the frontend operations. It all depends on budget, of course! This is just the start, just the core, of what we plan for the future. It's just a few days of my life, and my eye-opening to Sun.
Don't even get me started on Niagra. We're looking at that now too, and realizing with the savings we'll have in power and space, we'll be competitive in price with data centers were never thought we could be, due to high bandwidth pricing in Hawaii.
Not only that, but we'll be able to offer solutions nobody else can here, due to all of the innovative technologies in Solaris 10. We're starting clean, we can implement everything around the solution that best fits us. From the looks of things, that solution is Sun, and we're building our data center around that core. :)
Cheers,
David
PS - This was just to give some background, I didn't write it with
the intention of it being used directly. I can write up something
more formal and concise as needed. I just thought it'd be nice to
share a little more into where we stand, where we are going, and why
Sun looks like our best option to get there. I'll let you all take
the ball and roll it around for a bit. Feel free to shoot back any
questions, suggestions, feedback - anything. I'm here to provide
anything I can. :)
posted by jamesd_wi at Friday, March 24, 2006
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