Infobright Blog

As you can see from the press release, Sun gave us an opportunity to test out the new Open Storage solution, 7000 series. We had access to a 7410 with 12TB of raw disk storage and three 93 GB SSD Drives used by ZFS for read caches of active data, also referred to as ReadZilla. Two additional 16GB write based SSD’s called LogZilla completed the architecture.
 
Dirty little secret about Infobright, even with compression we are starved for disk space, so when this unit was offered up, we can hardly wait to load it up with a good sized database.
 
Obviously, the first step was to install it. Sun sent over some technicians to help us with that step, a little nervous with such a new beast that just rolled off the assembly line. Within 5 hours the devices was out of the box, rack mounted, configured and ready to rock and roll.  It was that simple.
 
It was nice to have Sun’s support with the install but in retrospect, we probably could of handled it ourselves. The documentation is top notch including the on-line help. The install and configuration are simple and straight-forward.
 
Next step, load the database. We loaded an existing 8TB database we had in database (compressed) format to make the process that much faster. Since the device doesn’t have any features that help with large sequential writes, we didn’t focus our testing on our loading process and focused on query where the large SDD cache would come into play.
 
At least that’s what we thought. However, that proved to be a bit harder to test out than we originally thought. The trouble with ICE/IEE is we are not disk bound so trying to stress the 7410 was a bit more difficult. We did manage in the end but that require us to change our tests to force more disk reads by flushing the memory of the servers involved.
 
I’m sure your aware that when it comes to performance testing, you need good measurement/monitoring tools. And this was another way that the open storage solution really shined. With DTrace in the back end the management console provides real time graphing and monitoring of disk activity, SDD activity, NFS operations, network transfer rates etc, all in a very nicely package interface that was intuitive to use and extremely informative. This granularity was invaluable for our performance testing and analysis. The analytical interface and level of detail provided is one of the best I’ve ever seen. Better still, all of the software, analysis tools and updates are part of the package, no extra costs here.
 
Good design makes complex things simple. The open storage solution is an example of good design. Well done.