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Sun Unveils Thumper Data Storage
zdzichu writes "At today's press conference, Sun Microsystems is showing off a few new systems. One of them is the Sun Fire x4500, known previously under the 'Thumper' codename. It's a compact dual Opteron rack server, 4U high, packed with 48 SATA-II drives. Yes, when standard for 4U server is four to eight hard disks, Thumper delivers forty-eight HDDs with 24 TB of raw storage. And it will double within the year, when 1TB drives will be sold. More information is also available at Jonathan Schwartz's blog."
and they are especially showing off the low power usage in that kind of space..
48 Hds, 2CPUs, and still less than 1200 Watts.
Oh many. Datafarm in a single rack.
Check out ZFS-- http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs
It makes managing this sort of storage box a snap, and allows you to dial up or down the level of redundancy by using either mirroring (2-way, 3-way, or more) or RAIDZ. And soon, RAIDZ2.
Additionally, Solaris running on the machine has fault managment support for the drives, and can work with the SMART data to predict drive failures, and exposes the drives to inspection via IPMI and other management interfaces. Fault LEDs light when drives experience failures, making them a snap to find and replace.
Why does everybody here get so up with "The HEAT!!111".
Its 48 hds in a 4U case. 48HDs is about 600W under full load.
If you compare this to the fact that there are dual-socket - dual core servers out there that push 300W through a 1U case, thats nothing.
Also, a 4U case allows the use of nice fat 12cm fans in the front, while the horizontal backplane allows for free airflow (in contrast to vertical ones like used before)
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Actually, software RAID is an advantage, performance-wise.
The old-time "big-ticket" was checksum calculation, but that is now an "also-ran". Distributing the i/o? Software can do it as well as hardware.
Both hardware and software have to be familiar with the blocking factor.
Where software wins is that it can be aware of, and skip reading to fill blocks if the block has never been used (or is not PRESENTLY in use). Which hardware RAID controllers cannot avoid doing.
The idea is to tie the RAID more tightly into the filesystem.
As to lower speed drives -- did you count the heads? Each is active at the same time. Yes, an individual i/o would complete faster with 10k or 15k spin, but the total throughput is based on the number of heads. For RAID5, reading multiple blocks will give you pretty much all the read performance you can stomach.
Write performance for an individual write operation would be improved; but generally application buffering deals with it. The tradeoff is number of heads, spin rate, and heat. The right balance? For you, write performance up, and, keeping heat constant, number of heads down (I presume that you are dealing with transactional loads, with commits). For me? tends to go the other way (my workload is general storage, with a bit of database).
As always, YMMV
Ratboy
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
ZFS can provide anywhere between 200% and 10% redundancy depending on what mode and stripe size you use. It should also automatically repair when failed disks are replaced.
This box is 100% designed to be used in mutual full advantage with ZFS. Thumper is what you would call a modern RAID array, as ZFS in this case blurs the destinction between hardware and software RAID. The CPU and memory horsepower is there for RAID-Z.
From this box, one can serve out file systems with NFS and/or SMB/CIFS (aka a traditional NAS), and in future releases of Solaris 10, also serve out LUNs over iSCSI and FCP while having all that data backed by the performance, reliability, and features of ZFS. The only thing it's missing is a consolidated, centralized CLI for manipulating storage, a la NetApp and ONTAP... but all the requisite pieces are there to turn Solaris, and especially Solaris-on-Thumper, into a NetApp killer at less cost.
As to backup and replication, think zfs: http://www.sun.com/2004-0914/feature/ Lots of folks are seeing this as simply a 2 socket server with lots of disk. With zfs it's more like a huge disk farm with an open, hackable interface and nice manners at the back end.
Organization? You must be joking..
I can give you a few reasons they might. Having been through some hardware RAID nightmares I have first hand experience with a few of them.
HW RAID makes you dependent upon the manufacturer of the card both for RAID implementation and for drivers. We once a a couple hardware RAID cards managing a large (at the time) RAID0+1 array that would occasionally glitch and fail a drive or two (or occasionally every drive on the controller). The driver and monitoring daemon wouldn't report anything until a second drive failed. Despite battery backup on the card cache, a single drive failure would often corrupt the data on the mirrored drive. The manufacturer was nowhere to be found when requesting updates or bug fixes.
We eventually switched to software RAID and found that in addition to making the array reliable it improved our performance. This was in part because the 6 CPUs on the machine were significantly faster than the 25MHz i960 managing the RAID cards. We could also mirror across controllers on the 4 separate PCI busses which gets rid of a major bottleneck (the I/O on a PCI bus can be easily saturated by a few drives)).
There are other benefits to being able to RAID across controllers. A RAID controller is a single point of failure. If a controller fails on a HW raid system, your array goes down. On SW RAID (done properly) a single controller can go away without a problem.
The most reliable storage system we have (a Network Appliance rack) is entirely software RAID. (RAID 4, a number you don't hear often).
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