From the category archives:

Storage

Review: SuperMicro’s SC847 (SC847A) 4U chassis with 36 drive bays

May 7, 2010
SuperMicro SC847 Thumbnail

[Or "my quest for the ultimate home-brew storage array."] At my day job, we use a variety of storage solutions based on the type of data we’re hosting. Over the last year, we have started to deploy SuperMicro-based hardware with OpenSolaris and ZFS for storage of some classes of data. The systems we have built [...]

Tagged as: Deduplication, Hardware, Nexenta, Open-source, OpenSolaris, Storage, SuperMicro, ZFS

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Sun’s Unified Storage 7210 – designed to disappoint?

February 23, 2010
Sun Logo

At my day job, we purchased 3 Sun (er, Oracle) 7210’s (part of their ‘Unified Storage’ platform; the machines are X4540’s with their specialized Unified Storage OS) on the recommendation of one of our vendors. The models we purchased contained 48 250gb disks and 32gb memory — no SSD’s. Our intent was to use these [...]

Tagged as: Customer Service, Oracle, Storage, Sun Microsystems, ZFS

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DRBD accepted to mainline kernel for 2.6.33!

December 8, 2009
DRBD Logo

As announced on Florian Haas’s blog, DRBD has been accepted into the mainline Linux kernel, and will be released with 2.6.33. Congratulations to the DRBD team on this major milestone! This will make the lives of all DRBD users much, much easier.
For those of you who are not aware, DRBD is a synchronous block-level replication [...]

Tagged as: Linux, Storage

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Are there any open-source worm filesystems?

November 8, 2009

I recently came across Nexenta’s WORM plugin for their commercial storage system, which is based on the OpenSolaris kernel and ZFS. For those of you that aren’t familiar with the term, WORM means ‘write-once read-many’ — in other words, after it’s written it cannot be modified, but can be read any number of times. I’d [...]

Tagged as: Nexenta, Open-source, Storage, ZFS

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Sun adds block-level deduplication to zfs

November 2, 2009
ZFS Logo

I’ve been eying ZFS for quite some time. I love the concepts of the filesystem, but am still not a huge fan of Solaris/OpenSolaris (I miss my apt-get, and am just used to the many Linux/GNU-isms.) I may actually have to give it a closer look (most likely via Nexenta, which is essentially Ubuntu with [...]

Tagged as: BackupPC, Deduplication, Nexenta, Open-source, OpenSolaris, Storage, Sun Microsystems, ZFS

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powervault 660f management

December 10, 2007

I’ve received a few requests over time about how to manage a Dell PowerVault 660F from Linux hosts, most recently from a nice guy named Robert. He reminded me that I really should post some information on this here, as it can be hard to find.
Standard Disclaimer: If you follow any of my tips and [...]

Tagged as: Dell, Management

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new backplane in my drive array

September 17, 2005

I’ve got the new backplane installed in the PowerVault 660F array. It sure was interesting to install – have to pull the entire array apart to get at it. I did find out that almost all of the weight is in the components – the actual casing for the array is light as a feather. [...]

Tagged as: Dell, Hardware

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