Review: Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System – Part I

]]> This is the last in a four-part series of posts on the Sun Storage 7000 USS storage arrays.  Previous posts in this series can be found here:

Review: Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System – Part I

Review: Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System – Part II

Review: Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System – Part III

Previous posts have discussed the physical hardware and what you can do with it.  Sun also do a simulator version of the 7000 series array, which can be used to evaluate the technology.  The Simulator is available for both VirtualBox and VMware.  I chose the VMware version and deployed it on VMware Fusion on my MacBook.

Installation

The installation process is remarkably simple.  Download and unzip the simulator (link here) and for Fusion, simply use File -> Open to open the file “SunStorage.vmwarevm”.  The configuration process then asks for some simple details – IP address, default gateway, password and so on.  Once this is complete, the simulator starts up and can be accessed via the standard web interface on port 215.  I’ve included a few screenshots at the end of this post that highlight the configuration process.

Configuration

Once logged into the simulator, a disclaimer is presented to the user indicating that this deployment isn’t for production usage or performance measurement. This is pretty obvious; the simulator shows functionally how things work but will never provide the same performance as a dedicated device.

The simulator provides 15x 2GB drives, which although not ‘real’ are more than enough to do evaluation with.  As far as I can tell, the simulator appears to be fully functional.

Summary

Sun have provided a simulator package that appears to pretty much mirror a real USS 7000 array.  Having a fully functional system like this enables new users to gain confidence with it; although not much training is needed, making the mistakes on a simulator is much more preferable to making them on the real thing.  In addition, it’s easy for any potential purchaser to get a real feel for how easy configuring the 7000 Series can be.

The 7000 simulator is probably equal or better than the Netapp simulator, which I’ve raved (and probably ranted) about many times.  It’s a shame that Netapp don’t choose to make their simulator open to all users, but that’s another discussion entirely.  The Sun 7000 simulator simply rounds out what to me is a great product, offering storage and simplicity in a single device.

Disclaimer: Sun Microsystems provided a USS 7000 series array on loan in order for me to evaluate this technology.  The unit has since been returned.  I have not been paid by Sun to write this series of posts or received any other benefit or inducement of any kind from Sun Microsystems.

If anyone does know – feel free to comment!

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The first thing I thought I needed was a working environment. I’m not keen on investing in an entire storage array (at this stage) to do the testing (unless some *very* generous vendor [...] ]]> I mentioned as a “Storage Resolution” to look more in-depth at iSCSI. Well I’ve started doing just that today.

The first thing I thought I needed was a working environment. I’m not keen on investing in an entire storage array (at this stage) to do the testing (unless some *very* generous vendor out there wants to let me “loan” one) so I’ve build a virtual environment based on a number of free components.

I’ve a dedicated VMware testing machine recently built which has a dual Core Intel processor, 2GB of RAM and a SATA drive. Nice and simple. It runs Win2K3 with the free VMware server, onto which I’ve created another Win2K3 R2 partition and a Linux partition running Fedora Core 6. This is where my iSCSI “target” will sit.

For those unfamiliar with SCSI terminology, the source disk or disk system presents LUNs which are referred to as targets. The host accessing those LUNs is the initiator; simply put the host initiates a connection to a target device, hence the names. My iSCSI target in this instance is a copy of the Netapp simulator running on Linux.

Most people are probably aware of the simulator. If not, Dave Hitz talks about it here. I’ve created a number of disks into an OnTAP volume and out of that created a LUN. LUNs can be presented out as FC or iSCSI, in this instance I’ve presented it out as iSCSI.

By default the simulator doesn’t enable iSCSI so I enabled it with the standard settings. This means my target’s iSCSI address is all based on Netapp defaults. I’m going to work on what the best practices should be for these settings over the coming days. Anyway, I’ve presented 2 LUNs and numbered them LUN 4 and LUN 9.

At the initiator (host) end, I’ve used my Win2K3 Server and installed the iSCSI initiator software from Microsoft. This gave me a desktop icon to configure the settings. Again, I’ve ended up with the default names for my iSCSI initiator, but that doesn’t matter; all I had to do was specify in the iSCSI initiator settings the IP address of my target, log on and it finds the LUNs (oh, one small point, I had to authorise the initiator on the simulator). Voila, I now have 2 disks configured to my Windows host which can be formatted as standard LUNs.

As a performance test, I ran HdTach against the iSCSI LUNs on Win2k3. I got a respectable 45MB/s throughput, which isn’t bad bearing in mind this environment is all virtual on the same physical machine.

All the above sounds a bit complicated, so I’ll break it down over the coming days as to what I had to do; I’ll also explain the iSCSI settings I needed to make and my experiments with dual pathing and taking the iSCSI devices away from Windows in mid-operation.