Ubiquitous Talk

OpenSolaris Storage Summit 2009

The OpenSolaris Storage Summit was really cool to attend this year. Mike Shapiro presented an interesting view of what is transpiring in storage hardware and where storage vendors need to focus on in order to be successful in the next few years. As always his presentation is a pleasure to follow. He talked about the s7000 series development and where it fits in terms of the current commodity hardware advancements. It was exciting to hear that we will see COMSTAR integration in the next firmware release coming in the second quarter on 2009. With the inclusion of COMSTAR we will have a very comprehensive storage provisioning solution that is fully supported by SUN.

        I also had the pleasure of hearing Don MackAskill speak on his experiences with OpenSolaris and the voyage that brought him to success on the s7000 product. His content was brilliant as usual and hopefully he will share more on SmugMug’s Blog site.

        I presented in the afternoon and talked about using COMSTAR to re-provision existing storage systems in an effort to enhance the performance and capacity of these aging products and retain their value. As well to bring some desired features to them like compression, snapshots and replication without the having the high cost licenses the on the native systems. I also created a couple of video frame stop demos. The first one demonstrated the ability to attach existing storage systems with Fiber Channel and reprovision LU’s which can then be transitioned from one storage head to another without impacting a storage consumer connection. In this case the consumer was VMware and was attached over both Fiber Channel and iSCSI in a multi path multi protocol configuration. The second demo revealed the cool world of encapsulation by virtualizing an OpenSolaris storage server within a VMware and then replicating ZFS from an X4500 to the virtulized OpenSolaris VM. Once in a virtual state we exposed replicated iSCSI targets to the underlying VMware ESXi server and attached to theVMFS volumes presented on the LU’s. 

        Ben Rockwood also presented in the afternoon and it was a great pleasure to see. He discussed his knowledge on ZFS. Specifically some of the things he has discovered as best practices and the use of tools. It was very informative and I wish he had much more time because the content was exceptional. All of the presenters both mentioned and not were really great I would like to thank all of them for giving us their valuable time in the OpenSolaris community efforts.

If your interested in the content please visit OpenSolaris Storage Summit

Regards,

Mike

Site Contents: © 2009  Mike La Spina