SanDisk and Nexenta release open-source, flash software-defined storage array | Hacker News Reader

SanDisk and Nexenta release open-source, flash software-defined storage array

zdnet.com

41 pointstanglesome14 comments

> Built on top of Oracle's ZFS, this scale-up, unified block (FC and iSCSI) and file (NFS and SMB) storage solution runs on Linux

I thought Nexenta was Solaris based and not Linux?

They probably just said that because it's ZFS, and didn't look at the upstream. IIRC, Nexenta pulls from Illumos like all the other ZFS-based storage vendors.

More specifically, NexentaStor (the OS which was explicitly mentioned in the article) was at one point based on OpenSolaris, and subsequently switched to illumos when Oracle inevitably murdered the OpenSolaris project.

The article reminds me of people who try to claim that "Mac OS is a Linux distro".

> Built on top of Oracle's ZFS

Didn't OpenZFS[1] diverge from Oracle ZFS? Initially Oracle didn't want to continue their ZFS in the open and there was a split. I didn't really follow what happened to that split afterwards. Nexenta is using OpenZFS.

[1]: http://www.open-zfs.org

Correct - except Oracle didn't just close ZFS, they closed all of Solaris. And they did it in the most spineless way ever - they just stopped releasing code without ever bothering to address the community.

We call this "Milton method" of open-source community management.

They did not close "all of Solaris".

Primarily, it was OS/Net that source is no longer available for.

Some consolidations such as pkg(5) (aka IPS) are still open and some components moved to already open consolidations such as userland even though license did not require it.

Yes, indeed. I was just focused on ZFS itself. There was a great talk about all that by Bryan Cantrill: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc

He says what he thinks about Oracle there ;)

Got $3,000,000?

They said the pricing is based on $1.5/raw GB, which means 3 mil for the 2PB configuration.

Maybe Santa can give me one for Christmas.

It's not great at the bottom end, either: 64TB raw for $96,000

Get a 24 x 2.5" 2U server, 3 8 channel SAS controllers, and 24 1 TB SATA SSDs. $15k or so will buy that. 3 of them are 72TB for $45K, so less than half the price, and certainly capable of saturating any network you can afford to run. Of course, if you just need 24TB, you can just buy one of the smaller machines.

You can fit it in one 4U machine with 72 x 2.5" disks for less money, but also less disk I/O, CPU, RAM and network bandwidth.

Is this "Big Data"? No, but neither was their 64TB config.

I wouldn't run nexenta any more, but your setup has no HA and no support.

You can run 3 x 24TB as a cluster, built for $45K, and get HA/failover... You can still run SmartOS/Illumos and ZFS for that matter... You should also be able to use any number of databases (Cassandra, RethinkDB, Cockroach) on there.

$1.50/gbyte is a huge premium over the price of lower end enterprise SSDs (which should be the dominant cost for this sort of thing).

SanDisk didn't give any technical specifics that I could find, but for comparison an Intel S3510 SSD is around $1.00/gbyte. At the higher end, it is around $1.60-$2.00, so I suppose they could be using fancier SSDs that would justify the price per gbyte.

So, is this supposed to compete with the offerings from Pure Storage and Solidfire?

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