RE: RE: @Matt Bryant -- HP Ripe For The Picking! #
Matt Bryant posts, "you keep telling us ZFS and OpenSlowaris are 'open', so if they really were that much in demand they'd be appearing a lot more on x64 kit from hp, IBM or Dell..."
Your spelling is atrocious. The product you couldn't spell is "OpenSolaris".
Your word search capability is also deficient. No one in the threads before your post ever made any argument indicating that the ZFS or OpenSolaris were "open". But since your post illustrates confusion over this, here is a document which details how you can also contribute!
http://www.opensolaris.com/use/SourceJuicer.pdf
Your connection with something someone didn't say to non-cited competitive vendor adoption rates is nonsensical. Your argument (linking "open"-ness and hardware competitor "demand") deteriorates by the fact that Microsoft Windows Server holds significant market share.
Matt Bryant posts, "the reality is Slowaris on x64 is even the slowest selling flavour at Sun, where Linux on Galaxy sales outstrip Slowaris on Galaxy."
Your spell check failed a couple more times, again. The product name you can't spell is "Solaris"
The HPC clusters really drive the Linux sales at Sun. Most substantial HPC clusters use Lustre.
http://www.hpcwire.com/offthewire/Suns_Lustre_File_System_Powers_Top_Supercomputers.html
Once Lustre is ported to Solaris, Solaris will be competitive in this area, since HPC clusters don't normally leverage commercial clustering software like QFS. More Lustre features are arriving in ZFS with every Solaris 10 release, so it is just a matter of time.
Matt Bryant posts, "flash is a commodity technology and not unique to Sun, so again there is nothing to even suggest Sun has any advantage there"
All flash is not created equal. Some flash is faster and less reliable, some flash is slower and more reliable.
What makes Sun's advantage so aggressive in the market is the intelligent use of the each kind of flash, in ZFS at the kernel layer, to provide transparent application acceleration. Failure of flash cache can be tolerated (and locked out) while failure of flash file system intent logs is less tolerable, should be high quality, and should be mirrored.
Matt Bryant posts, "there are other filesystems that do a better job than ZFS. BTRFS... is one for Linux"
http://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page
"Btrfs is under heavy development, and is not suitable for any uses other than benchmarking and review. The Btrfs disk format is not yet finalized, but it will only be changed if a critical bug is found and no workarounds are possible."
Unreliability is a key focus of Matt's Linux postings. Looks great on benchmarks and in slide-ware. (Even the default configuration of most Linux NFS configurations is to ignore NFS client write sync to disk on the server side.) But, that's OK - Sun sells & supports Linux for those crowds, too!
Matt Bryant posts, "hp ProLiant is the market-leader for x64 for a reason - because hp bring the right products, innovations and services to market at the right price. Sun's Galaxy is a 'me too' market-trailer"
HP targets a different market than Sun with their Intel compatible line. I guess HP could make ProLiant more competitive with OpenSolaris, ZFS, and using some nice HP USB thumb drives (for ZFS cache) tied next to their USB printers. There is nothing wrong with that, it is just a different focus area. ;-)
Sun has targeted the Galaxy line at HPC systems, expanded the focus to network appliances for very large scale media storage installations (i.e. video, audio, news, etc.) and Oracle, Postgres, and MySQL appliances & implementation support. Sun has been consistently scoring superior or competitive in these areas in relation to the competition.
With the flash storage system integrated into ZFS File System, ZFS integrated into the OpenSolaris and Solaris Kernel, integrating CIFS directly into the OpenSolaris Kernel, creating awesome InfiniBand switched infrastructure, embedding 10GigE into the CPU chips on some of their offerings, and open sourcing Solaris hardly makes the product suites a "me-too" offering from Sun.