coffee
Tanks you for "Thankfully, Sun realizes that not everyone is looking for a 3,456 port InfiniBand switch" - i laughed so hard i almost spread my coffee over the screen. What a nice start of monday morning.
Sun's hardware chief John "I don't comment on unannounced products" Fowler has storage on the brain. The longtime Sun exec recently took over the company's storage business, adding tape and disk to his responsibilities as server chief. Fowler, during an interview here at Supercomputing, confessed to having an unfulfilled …
"The features of ZFS include high storage capacity, integration of the concepts of filesystem and volume management, a novel on-disk structure, ...." ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS
The $7777777 question is then always going to be what novel are Sun Virtualising for Media and IT to Digitise and Present to Us as the Future 42 Follow.
Sun had started to sort out the tape business in their acquired storage division, they could have maybe been taken more seriously by customers, for all of the new products (VTL, etc ...).
Today, they have 3 libs:
- SL500: atrocious sh**e
- L700/1400: obsolete, as per STK themselves. They removed all L models, 3 years back, except for this one to fill the gap.
- SL8500: gigantic, can't fit anywhere else than Los Alamos labs. 2.35m height, 4 m long, nearly 3 m large and oh, yes, 1 m needs be empty all around. Entry ticket at 1500 tapes ! What a footprint ! On top of that, that massive thing still runs under the ill-designed ACSLS, which is the SPOF of the architecture (except if clustered).
Ashlee (as usual) hit the nail on the head.
"Sun has spent years talking about this system under the 'Honeycomb' code-name. The system took so long to design and ship due to a drawn out prototyping process and extensive testing, according to Fowler."...
Yeah, right. Best I can remember Sun started talking about Honeycomb in 2003, and here it is almost 2008 and they're just now shipping. Everyone else is on revision 2.0 for content storage, and in the case of EMC, rev 3.0. Let's see, now there's ZFS that's somehow going to fix everything. Problem is ZFS was designed for a few JBOD, not real storage. In fact, without delicate tuning, ZFS wants to turn your HDS USP-V into a bunch of dumb disks.
And now, they've been talking about Fishworks for a year, and still nothing. When it finally gets released my guess is Fishworks will be nothing but a collection of open sourced standalone tools like SCSI target mode, iSCSI target, CIFS kernel implementation and a lightweight GUI or 3... Wow, now that's a Celerra and NetApp killer if I've ever seen one!
Sun just doesn't get the storage market, never has, and probably never will. They only did one thing right in storage ever, and that was supporting FC back in 1996. It's been all down hill ever since.