A common question from our customers on Sun Storage Domains on the Sun Storage 2500 and 6000 range is

"How many storage domains do I need to buy for my configuration.

 Of course, the real answer is "it depends!" for everything other than a single host instance (and even then it's not guaranteed - see below!)

To read the entire article at its source, please refer to So how many Storage Domains do I need?

A new micro update to the 2009.Q2 software has been posted. This release fixes a double-parity RAID data integrity issue and is recommended for all double-parity RAID users still using 2009.Q2 software. This issue is already fixed in the 2009.Q3 software. All users with double-parity RAID configurations should scrub their pool(s) after upgrading to this software.

I've just read through several comments regarding the F5100. Is it just me or is common sense on vacation at the moment at some locations. I will go through some of this comments and dissect them here.

To read the entire article at its source, please refer to App benchmarks, incorrect conclusions and the Sun Storage F5100

HPC Wire cites some glowing customer quotes from Sun HPC customers on the performance of the Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array. Don Thorp, Operations Manager at SDSC had this to say:

Some time ago I wrote a blog about stretched clusters and the OCR. The final conclusion at that time was that there was no easy way to get your OCR safe on both storages, and hence I disrecommended clusters with 2 storage boxes. However, after some more investigation I may have to change my mind. I did extended testing on the OCR and in this blog I want to share my experiences.

If virtual, create the disk first
Either through the Oracle VM Manager interface (Virtual Machine Configure -> Storage -> Create New Virtual Disk), or by stopping the virtual machine and editing the vm.cfg file (adding lines to the disk clause like for example: ‘file:/OVS/running_pool/21_db01/asm01.img,xvde,w’,). In the latter case, these new virtual disks must exist before the vm is started again, typically by creating zero-filled files with dd (place in the directory specified in the vm.cfg):

This document describes the steps to create and prepare volumes on a Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System to be published to a server running Microsoft Windows 2003 Server, using CIFS or iSCSI with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 databases.

An article by Sun engineer Ulrich Conrad shows how to set up a Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System to use CommVault Simpana Data Archiver (DA). This quick-start guide presents a scenario using the Common Internet File System (CIFS) protocol.

This paper provides a guide to open storage solutions for data-intensive HPC environments, this paper gives you an update on trends and challenges in delivering the necessary I/O throughput for high-performance computing (HPC) applications.

You'll also learn about why open storage solutions are important to HPC and how Sun is utilizing open storage technologies to benefit HPC customers including Flash Technology, Network Storage, Parallel Storage, and Archive Storage.

If you saw Don MacAskill's keynote (The Smugmug Tale) at the recent MySQL Conference and Expo, you know that he had lots of positive things to say about his experience running MySQL on the Sun Storage 7410 at Smugmug.

The Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage Array delivers over 36000 of random 8K reads per second from a 400GB working set for great Mail application responsiveness. This corresponds to an entreprise of 100000 people with every employee accessing new data every 3.6 second consolidated on a single server.

To read the entire article at its source, please refer to Performance of the Sun Storage 7310 and 7410

The new member of this open storage family has an entry-level cluster option for high availability, DTrace Analytics, and enterprise flash technology, and it can scale up to 96 terabytes.

As flash memory has become more and more prevalent in storage from the consumer to the

For performance testing storage products, in particular the Sun Storage 7000 series, I previously posted the top 10 suggestions for performance testing, and the little stuff to check.

This quick start guide shows how to configure the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System (2008.Q4) for Oracle RAC infrastructure deployment, using the Solaris 10 OS or Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

For DB2 applications, Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems meet a range of functional requirements for availability, capacity, and performance. This Sun BluePrints™ article describes the steps needed to configure and install a DB2 database in a Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System environment. The article addresses the following topics:

This quick start guide describes configuring Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System volumes for export as iSCSI targets, then configuring those iSCSI logical unit numbers (LUNs) at the database server to be used for Oracle ASM.

This quick start guide shows how to deploy Oracle Database using the NFS protocol with the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System.

The Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System supports NFS v3, NFS v4, iSCSI, and CIFS protocols and comes with a comprehensive set of data service features that can provide unlimited snapshots, clones, and remote replication. This guide to deploying Oracle Database using the NFS protocol is applicable to Sun Storage 7110, 7210, and 7410 Unified Storage Systems (2008.Q4).

Sun Microsystems Inc. is boosting the capacity of its Amber Road network-attached storage (NAS) appliances, which the vendor says has more than 800 paying customers in the six months since its release. However, Amber Road's future depends upon Oracle Corp. once the firm completes its $5.6 billion acquisition of Sun.

n the heels of the 2009.Q2.0.0 release, we've posted an update to the Sun Storage 7000 simulator. The simulator contains the exact same software as the other members of the 7000 series, but runs inside a VM rather than on actual hardware.

The first major software update for the Sun Storage 7000 series (2009.Q2.0.0) has been released with new features, technology improvements, bug fixes and added support of virtual machines that should interest users of the Sun Storage 7000 simulator, which also has a new update.

Sun Storage 7000 Simulator Update

Over the past few months I have been talking to a lot of people about Open Storage. So far I haven't talked to anyone outside of Sun who doesn't first ask the question "What is Open Storage anyway?" or "When you say Open Storage what does that mean exactly?". But defining a concept like Open Storage can be difficult. Here is one definition ...

Open Storage: As a general term, open storage refers to storage systems built with an open architecture using industry-standard hardware and open-source software.

The Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System got high marks -- five stars out of a possible six -- from Dave Mitchell, whose review in ITPro praises Sun for making so many features standard on the 7410 and for not introducing hidden costs too late in the deal for customers to back out.

In a previous post I scratched the surface of how ZFS uses the ZFS Intent Log (ZIL), and how the 7000 Series uses Solid State Disk (SSD) to accelerate its performance.