Comments on: Sun Honeymoon Update: Storage

By: SmugBlog: Don MacAskill » Blog Archive » Companies That Listen: Sun

SmugBlog: Don MacAskill » Blog Archive » Companies That Listen: Sun — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 19:12:26 +0000

[...] I’m happy to report that Sun listens to their customers. Really, truly, listens. Even to small ones like me. Even to small ones like me who complain loudly when a product isn’t right (but who cheer equally loudly when it is). [...]

By: It’s all Hard » Blog Archive » Sun StorEdge 3320 Review

It’s all Hard » Blog Archive » Sun StorEdge 3320 Review — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 11:48:24 +0000

[...] read more | digg story [...]

By: sun » Blog Archive » Sun StorEdge 3320 Review

sun » Blog Archive » Sun StorEdge 3320 Review — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 12:05:11 +0000

[...] read more | digg story [...]

By: SmugBlog: Don MacAskill » Blog Archive » Dell MD3000 - Great DAS DB Storage

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 00:03:07 +0000

[...] So I’ve written about storage before, specifically our quest for The Perfect DB Storage Array and how Sun’s storage didn’t stack up with their excellent servers. As you can probably tell, I spend a lot of my time thinking about and investigating storage - both small-and-fast for our DBs and huge-and-slower (like S3) for our photos. [...]

By: Rob

Rob — Fri, 25 May 2007 18:46:31 +0000

Sun storage in this range has been awful for years. Way, way, overpriced and nearly impossible to make perform decently. I see even their new line of storage is still way overpriced. At my previous job I bought a bunch of Sun V20Z’s but used Dell storage (connected to LSI MegaRaid cards installed in the V20Z). Before that I was forced to use another departments Sun T-3 Fibre Channel storage. It was hideously slow and ungodly expensive. Finally a Sun tech discovered some sort of misconfiguration and it got to the point of being usuable, but I could still get better write performance on a single UltraSCSI disk.

The Dell storage attached to the V20Z flew like lightning.

BTW, has anyone at Sun contacted you about you about your miserable experience?

By: Sun StorEdge 3320 Review « Veronica’s Lore

Sun StorEdge 3320 Review « Veronica’s Lore — Thu, 24 May 2007 00:34:16 +0000

[...] Get the whole scoop here… [...]

By: "links for 2007-05-23" by Bob Plankers, The Lone Sysadmin

"links for 2007-05-23" by Bob Plankers, The Lone Sysadmin — Wed, 23 May 2007 06:17:29 +0000

[...] SmugBlog: Don MacAskill » Blog Archive » Sun Honeymoon Update: Storage [...]

By: Neil Corlett

Neil Corlett — Tue, 22 May 2007 22:52:59 +0000

AFAIK, the SE3320 is re-badged DotHill kit. They were generally pretty good.
There are Sun blogs floating around that suggest increasing the number of PCI transactions in play speeds things up.
http://blogs.sun.com/ValdisFilks/entry/improving_i_o_throughput_for
However, black magic ought not be necessary. This stuff should (preferably) work out of the box (esp. from a systems company) or it should be well documented in the release notes. Too often it is not.

By: Don MacAskill

Don MacAskill — Thu, 17 May 2007 07:03:03 +0000

@Bruce Davis:

We were using hardware RAID every step of the way, including on the SE3320s. So yes, we were comparing apples to apples, at least as much as is possible with 4 different vendors. (At one point, we had Apple Xserve RAID alongside LSI MegaRAID alongside Sun SE3320s alongside Dell MD3000s. Whew!)

No JBOD in the mix. Software raid is really freaking fast, btw. Often faster than hardware. But we need reliable battery-backed write caching, which software raid can’t provide (at least, not on any hardware we own).

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 17 May 2007 06:33:46 +0000

Sun has always made awesome servers, but their storage has always been pretty bad.. The only arrays they got right were the A5200s, and those didn’t even come with a RAID controller.