craving zNAS

Pubblicato da il 18 giugno 2010 in Storage | View Comments

I’ll receive our first zNAS from Compellent next week, but I would like to start a short series of articles anticipating some features of the new box.

zNAS is the new, ZFS based, NAS head from Compellent, it’s an optional component of the Compellent Storage Center SAN to realize a unified storage system. With “unified storage system” I don’t mean a unified box (they are indeed different boxes) but a system that looks like a single logical entity capable to deliver volumes for block and file access.
It uses the standard Compellent licensing model (per active disks) and it is managed from NMV (NAS Management View) that will be integrated in the next version of Enterprise Manager to get a single pane of glass management interface.

The architecture

As you probably know, Compellent offers awesome software features on standard hardware, and this new product has the same approach:

  • Based on ZFS filesystem;
  • NFS/CIFS/WebDAV/FTP/RSYNC protocols support;
  • GUI and CLI interfaces for management;
  • Integrated and transparent to all Compellent features (Data Progression, Fast Track, Replicas);
  • Snapshots for shared volumes;
  • Space saving features: file compression now and deduplication soon;
  • High performance controllers (2 quad core CPUs and 48GB of RAM per node);
  • High bandwidth (up to 12 active ethernet ports on FE, 4 FC 8gb/sec on BE);
  • High availability (two node clusters);
  • Optional WORM capabilities;

The nodes don’t use boot disks, they boot directly from a Compellent volume.

Our installation

An highly availabele cluster comprised by two heads equipped with 24GB of RAM each on top of a SAN configured with 2 Series 30 controllers, 3 146GB SSDs, 13 300GB/15K RPM FCs and 16 2TB SATA disks.

@fabiorapposelli and @ionocatabi will install the NAS next week and they will perform some tests before going production.
stay tuned!

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  • Snorkel

    I think the zNAS is a fantastic product. My only concern that is causing me to pause is the rather shaky status of OpenSolaris due to the Oracle acquisition. There has been a lot of talk about the free version of Solaris disappearing, and if this happens where does it leave Compellent and the zNAS customers? Indeed, it would not be the first time that Compellent chose a NAS technology only to watch it vaporize and leave the early adopters in a lurch.

    I have similar, but slightly smaller concerns about ZFS in general. The file system is open, but from what I can tell there aren’t exactly a lot of non-Sun/Oracle employees working on it. If Oracle chose to abandon it or fork it and go closed source, Compellent could find itself with a NAS head slowly becoming out of date.

    Do you have any similar concerns? I brought this up with my Compellent reps, and they did not feel that there was any risk of OpenSolaris disappearing, though they could not provide me any evidence.

    I do hope you like your zNAS, and I very much look forward to reading about your impressions. I am certainly craving a zNAS as well. :)

  • Enrico Signoretti

    Snorkel,
    I agree 100% with you when you say the future of OpenSolaris isn’t very clear but zNAS isn’t based on the original version of OpenSolaris it’s based on the Nexenta’s one!
    The Nexenta community is very active in the development (indeed the nexenta ZFS has more features than the Oracle’s one).

    Enrico

  • Snorkel

    I think the zNAS is a fantastic product. My only concern that is causing me to pause is the rather shaky status of OpenSolaris due to the Oracle acquisition. There has been a lot of talk about the free version of Solaris disappearing, and if this happens where does it leave Compellent and the zNAS customers? Indeed, it would not be the first time that Compellent chose a NAS technology only to watch it vaporize and leave the early adopters in a lurch.

    I have similar, but slightly smaller concerns about ZFS in general. The file system is open, but from what I can tell there aren't exactly a lot of non-Sun/Oracle employees working on it. If Oracle chose to abandon it or fork it and go closed source, Compellent could find itself with a NAS head slowly becoming out of date.

    Do you have any similar concerns? I brought this up with my Compellent reps, and they did not feel that there was any risk of OpenSolaris disappearing, though they could not provide me any evidence.

    I do hope you like your zNAS, and I very much look forward to reading about your impressions. I am certainly craving a zNAS as well. :)

  • Amanga

    It’s unlikely Oracle will ever abandon ZFS development. The latest Oracle Solaris 11 Express provide several enhancements to ZFS. Moreover, despite if the OpenSolaris project is dead, ZFS and the whole Solaris OS are still going on.
    As stated by TheRegister.co.uk about one year ago, I would rather say that:

    “Anyone downstream from Oracle that is consuming Solaris source code for their own distributions or amusement will continue to be able to do so, much as Oracle waits for Red Hat to finish its Enterprise Linux releases and versions, and then makes its own snapshots, replacing logos and such to make Oracle Enterprise Linux. So the OpenSolaris-based distros from Nexenta, Belenix, and SchilliX can continue to base themselves on CDDL-licensed Solaris code, but they are passive recipients of whatever Oracle cooks up, and not part of the development process as that Solaris code is being created.”

    Considering the above, it is hard to say if Compellent (now Dell) will evaluate a different technology to power its future NAS heads…

  • Enrico Signoretti

    The new Dell’s vision/roadmap is clear: exanet clustered NAS on top of all its storage (Equallogic/Compellent). Rumors are saying that we will see exanet product in less than 6 months (probably before June). zNAS is dead.

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