Comments on: Note to RIM: Buy Some Zetera

By: Administrator

Administrator — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 18:16:42 +0000

I am reading the same trades that you are. While no fingers have been pointed by RIM at storage in what coverage I have read, many insiders are commenting that it was indeed storage related. The blogosphere might be wrong on this one (as it sometimes is), but I suspect there is a kernel of truth in what the commenters are saying.

By: brad

brad — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 15:57:37 +0000

The storage industry folks pinged you to write about Zetera or about RIM’s service outage? Can you share with us what you have read since? I’m interested to find out if the most recent outage was a storage issue, but not so interested in the speculation of such a cause. I only know what RIM’s PR department has disclosed.

By: Administrator

Administrator — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 22:04:14 +0000

Brad, you are right that the piece cited did not specifically refer to storage. However, I was pinged several times by several storage folks from the industry encouraging me to write something about this. From what I have read since, there were storage capacity scaling issues involved.

Do you know something that I don’t?

By: brad

brad — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 21:27:52 +0000

Note to the Author: Please read your sources more carefully. The (one) source you point out nowhere indicates that the problem was due to storage capacity upgrade. The source mentions a capacity upgrade, but nothing about storage specifically.

By: jhutchins

jhutchins — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 14:33:53 +0000

Jon:

If you’ve noticed from my other posts, I’m generally supportive of your views. However, on Zetera, I feel that I have to call you out (or at least try to understand what you are talking about).

The biggest Zetera box appears to be 9TB raw capacity (I hunted around the site and this is the biggest I could find). I’ll assume the functionality is outstanding but at RAID 10 you get, at best, 4.5 usable TBs. To get 20TB’s usable (about the point where SMB creeps into medium/large size for some folks), I would need 4 enclosures totalling 8u. Besides the power and other enviornmentals, that’s an incredible footprint for 20TBs and doesn’t seem very practical.

That said, vthe olume virtualization as you describe it is VERY attractive.

By: Administrator

Administrator — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 13:23:31 +0000

By the way, mirroring can be accomplished in Zetera without a RAID card or software. It is done by adding an additional subscriber group and just doing copy on write. They support some other schemes as well, but this is one that I like and use a lot.

By: Administrator

Administrator — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 13:22:06 +0000

I know the RAID levels (even the nonstandard ones), Tom. My original point was only that you could scale volumes seamlessly. My concern about RAID 5 and 6 is the problem of multiple concurrent or sequential drive failures in a RAID set. I have just had this experience personally with a series of drives from WD that had the same problem. Ten drives failed within a couple of days of each other — which would have played havoc with any RAID scheme you have.

By the way, it is great to hear from you!

By: TomTreadway

TomTreadway — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 13:00:25 +0000

“…you could effectively mirror everything for less money than it would take to RAID…”

Mirroring is RAID-1. I believe you were referring to RAID-5/6.

RAID-5/6 would be significantly cheaper than RAID-1 because it requires fewer disks for the same capacity. (A 16-disk RAID-5 array has almost twice the capacity of a 16-disk RAID-1 array.) The reason for not using RAID-5/6 is the poor write performance and additional complexity to implement it. So I don’t disagree with Zetera’s stance to support only RAID-1. (BTW, I assume it’s actually RAID-10, but that’s just a detail.)

By: Administrator

Administrator — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 12:45:00 +0000

Wow! Look at all the feedback on this simple observation. Truth be told, jhutchins, you can build pretty large infrastructures (well beyond a few TBs) using UDP subscriber groups. Given the low cost of raw disk versus the mark-up on disk with “value add” from other vendors, you could effectively mirror everything for less money than it would take to RAID — though I believe that one of the Zetera engineers addressed their RAID support in a previous post, if that is the way you prefer to go.

Glad to hear about the forthcoming general release of Linux support, Chuck. The problem with Linux is all of the distributions and how many different Linuxes you ultimately need to support. That inhibits a lot of folks from doing Linux at all.

I just threw it out there based on the great success I am having with fairly large buildouts of arrays based on Zetera technology, and on the success that MIT is having with its multi-petabyte build out.

By: sasher

sasher — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 20:30:00 +0000

Chuck: Zetera MAC drivers are in Beta and Linux is in Alpha

This is great news!

We’ve been looking at Zetera for more than a year, now, but lack of Linux support was a show-stopper. Some questions:
o Do you have an ETA?
o What distributions of Linux are you planning to support?
o Any chance of VMWare ESX support?

Regards,
–J