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A colleague and I were  working with a new Seagate Black Armor 420 NAS appliance today and struggling with NFS.  It was often taking 20 or more seconds for local NFS mounts to occur, and this was below the timeout of our main clients (VMWare ESXi 4.0).  While the NAS has a feature that will automatically tell you if there are newer versions of the firmware available, this wasn’t working properly.  The device indicated that no new firmware was available, but after some forum searching, we saw a newer version (4000.0631) was downloadable.  The manual upgrade went fine and then NFS started working like a champ.   If you have a tight ( < $1000) budget for a Network Attached Storage device, the Black Armor line seem to be pretty feature rich for the price.

I spent last week at the LISA Conference in Baltimore MD.  if you aren’t familiar with LISA, it is a conference focused on system administration.  This is the 4th  LISA I’ve attended in the last 12 years.

On Monday I attended a tutorial by Richard Elling on ZFS: A Filesystem for Modern Hardware.

On Tuesday I attended two tutorials.  The first was Jacob Farmer’s Disk-to-Disk Backup and Eliminating Backup System Bottlenecks.  The second was Tom Limoncelli’s Design Patterns for System Administrators.

Unfortunately on both Monday and Tuesday I had to spend a significant amount of time on conference calls helping to troubleshoot some work related issues, but the time I spent in all 3 sessions and viewing their materials was helpful.  I would definitely recommend attending tutorials by any of the 3 people above if they are teaching a topic of interest to you.

On Tuesday night I attended some (Open)Solaris birds-of-a-feather sessions.  There were a few times that people in the crowd were being belligerent towards a speaker (mostly complaining about the difficulty of finding information of various types), even though the speaker certainly had no sway over what the person in the crowd was upset about.  I don’t care how much money your company spends with a vendor, there is never a reason to be rude.   David Miner gave a talk about whats coming in Solaris.next and Ben Rockwood gave an entertaining and informative presentation on ZFS in the Trenches.

I was lucky enough to get a chance to talk with David Miner over a quick lunch later in the week and talk about the new opportunities and challenges with the OpenSolaris installation technologies.

On Wednesday through Friday I attended a mix of presentations, met with a bunch of vendors, and also sat in some of the ‘Guru is in’ sessions and talked with a number of conference attendees.  The highlights for me were:

• Werner Vogel (CTO of Amazon) gave a fascinating talk on the history of Amazon’s IT philosophy and infrastructure and how they evolved from a humble internal IT shop to adding a business which is the dominant  cloud computing provider.
• Elizabeth Zwicky’s talk on “Searching for Truth, or at Least Data: How to Be an Empiricist Skeptic”
• Bryan Cantrill’s talk on “Visualizing DTrace: Sun Storage 7000 Analytics”
  
• Talking with the folks from Splunk (awesome log searching analysis tool)

Adam Leventhal just blogged about a new form factor for solid state drives that will be announced soon called the ‘Open Flash Module’.  From the picture, it looks like the form-factor is based around SO-DIMM (commonly used in laptops).  I’m excited to see this since the most common form factor now is 2.5 inch or 3.5 inch drives that connect to SATA/SAS/SCSI/FC bays, which is great for compatibility (physical form-factor as well as drivers), but is a huge waste of potential density.  The new form-factor should allow you to have much greater density and boost bandwidth/reduce latency compared to current implementations.  One thing I am curious about though is the ability to hot-plug a form-factor like this which seems like it will be plugging straight in to a motherboard.

Update: Sun just posted more information about it here.  Initial capacity will be 24G with a 64M DRAMM buffer.

Here is a cool video showing that the sonic vibration from yelling at a high-speed disk can cause the latency of IOs to go up.
They are using the analytics from a Sun Unified Storage Server to show the info.

Update: I did some more research on the effects of vibration on hard drive performance.  It looks like a lot of vendors are offering technology to attempt to compensate in certain drives models, although it gets tougher when you are using 15k RPM drives.  Storage Mojo has a short post from about two years ago on the topic.

A co-worker had a question today about QFS that I wanted to test out. I didn’t have any machines handy that had free disk drives, but I did have a machine which had free space in a ZFS pool. It was simple to make some zvols to emulate block devices and created a QFS file system on top of the zvols. Here is what I did:

root@t2000: 415 # pkgadd -d . SUNWqfsr SUNWqfsu

root@t2000: 416 # zfs create -V 2g zfs/metadata
root@t2000: 417 # zfs create -V 2g zfs/data1
root@t2000: 418 # zfs create -V 2g zfs/data2

root@t2000: 419 # vi /etc/opt/SUNWsamfs/mcf
qfs1 10 ma qfs1 on
/dev/zvol/dsk/zfs/metadata 11 mm qfs1 on
/dev/zvol/dsk/zfs/data1 12 mr qfs1 on
/dev/zvol/dsk/zfs/data2 13 mr qfs1 on

root@t2000: 420 # /opt/SUNWsamfs/sbin/sammkfs -a 128 qfs1

root@t2000: 421 # echo “qfs1 – /qfs1 samfs – yes stripe=1″ >> /etc/vfstab

root@t2000: 421 # mkdir /qfs1

root@t2000: 422 # mount /qfs1

I’m positive my configuration wasn’t optimal, but it was very easy to get QFS setup to answer the question.

I just saw an annoucement about QFS being open-sourced, very cool indeed.