An Economical Approach to Maximizing Data Availability: Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems 
by Mike Shapiro
Updated - September 2009
Storage is a trust business. Sun's new line of integrated storage appliances provide the reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) attributes necessary to preserve customer data and meet enterprise expectations. Some aspects of RAS for storage are well defined by IT organizations and the industry. Sun's Open Unified Storage systems meet these requirements by delivering features such as RAID-6, active-active clustering, integrity checking, redundancy, replication, and snapshot capabilities. Other aspects of the RAS design of Sun's Open Unified Storage systems are new to the industry and offer exceptional value. In particular, the use of NAND Flash devices in conjunction with the Solaris ZFS file system defines a unique, highly reliable architecture that aims to provide the best possible price for performance ratio.
This article provides an overview of the RAS features of Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems. The content of this article assumes a basic understanding of common enterprise-class storage features and the Solaris ZFS file system.
Contents
- Introduction
- Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability Design Approach
- Fault Management and Predictive Self Healing
- Storage System RAS Design
- Disk Block
- Disk
- Flash Page and Blocks
- Flash Device and SSD
- SAS Expander
- SAS JBOD
- SAS Host Bus Adapter
- Storage Controller
- Network Interface
- Generic RAS Features
- Hardware View
- Problems View
- Log View
- Configuration and Services
- Alerts View
- Dashboard Status
- DTrace Analytics
- Phone Home
- Service Tags
- SNMP
- Lights Out Management
- Upgrade
- Pulling It All Together
- For More Information
- About the Author
- Related Resources
Mike Shapiro is a Distinguished Engineer in Solaris Kernel Development at Sun Microsystems. He holds a Masters of Science degree in computer science from Brown University. Mike's research and engineering interests are focused on technology to enhance the availability of computer and storage systems, including programming languages and debugging tools for developers, operating system technologies for handling and recovering from software and hardware faults and defects, and tools for administrators and users that improve the user experience.
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Comments (1)
Oct 04
hiroa says:
Hi, I think this is great white paper which describe SS7000 and ZFS availability...Hi, I think this is great white paper which describe SS7000 and ZFS availability feature overall and detailed for some.
But this paper looks more difficult than its contents because it contains few figures, charts, etc, filled with text.
Do you have some plans to make "presentation material" version of this paper? Thanks.