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• Older SAS1 hardware Vs. newer SAS2 hardware

  - by user12620172

  I got a question today from someone asking about the older SAS1 hardware from over a year ago that we had on the older 7x10 series. They didn't leave an email so I couldn't respond directly, but I said this blog would be blunt, frank, and open so I have no problem addressing it publicly. A quick history lesson here: When Sun first put out the 7x10 family hardware, the 7410 and 7310 used a SAS1 backend connection to a JBOD that had SATA drives in it. This JBOD was not manufactured by Sun nor did Sun own the IP for it. Now, when Oracle took over, they had a problem with that, and I really can’t blame them. The decision was made to cut off that JBOD and it’s manufacturer completely and use our own where Oracle controlled both the IP and the manufacturing. So in the summer of 2010, the cut was made, and the 7410 and 7310 had a hardware refresh and now had a SAS2 backend going to a SAS2 JBOD with SAS2 drives instead of SATA. This new hardware had two big advantages. First, there was a nice performance increase, mostly due to the faster backend. Even better, the SAS2 interface on the drives allowed for a MUCH faster failover between cluster heads, as the SATA drives were the bottleneck on the older hardware. In September of 2010 there was a major refresh of the rest of the 7000 hardware, the controllers and the other family members, and that’s where we got today’s current line-up of the 7x20 series. So the 7x20 has always used the new trays, and the 7410 and 7310 have used the new SAS2 trays since last July of 2010. Now for the bad news. People who have the 7410 and 7310 from BEFORE the July 2010 cutoff have the models with SAS1 HBAs in them to connect to the older SAS1 trays. Remember, that manufacturer cut all ties with us and stopped making the JBOD, so there’s just no way to get more of them, as they don’t exist. There are some options, however. Oracle support does support taking out the SAS1 HBAs in the old 7410 and 7310 and put in newer SAS2 HBAs which can talk to the new trays. Hey, I didn’t say it was a great option, I just said it’s an option. I fully realize that you would then have a SAS1 JBOD full of SATA drives that you could no longer connect. I do know a client that did this, and took the SAS1 JBOD and connected it to another server and formatted the drives and is using it as a plain, non-7000 JBOD. This is not supported by Oracle support. The other option is to just keep it as-is, as it works just fine, but you just can’t expand it. Then you can get a newer 7x20 series, and use the built-in ZFSSA replication feature to move the data over. Now you can use the newer one for your production data and use the older one for DR, snaps and clones.

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• New ZFSSA code release - April 2012

  - by user12620172

  A new version of the ZFSSA code was released over the weekend. In case you have missed a few, we are now on code 2011.1.2.1. This minor update is very important for our friends with the older SAS1 cards on the older 7x10 systems. This 2.1 minor release was made specifically for them, and fixes the issue that their SAS1 card had with the last major release. They can now go ahead and upgrade straight from the 2010.Q3.2.1 code directly to 2011.1.2.1. If you are on a 7x20 series, and already running 2011.1.2.0, there is no real reason why you need to upgrade to 1.2.1, as it's really only the Pandora SAS1 HBA fix. If you are not already on 1.2.0, then go ahead and upgrade all the way to 2011.1.2.1. I hope everyone out there is having a good April so far. For my next blog, the plan is to work off the Analytic tips I did last week and expand on which Analytics you want to really keep your eyes on, and also how to setup alerts to watch them for you. You can read more and keep up on your releases here: https://wikis.oracle.com/display/FishWorks/Software+Updates Steve   

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• New SPC2 benchmark- The 7420 KILLS it !!!

  - by user12620172

  This is pretty sweet. The new SPC2 benchmark came out last week, and the 7420 not only came in 2nd of ALL speed scores, but came in #1 for price per MBPS. Check out this table. The 7420 score of 10,704 makes it really fast, but that's not the best part. The price one would have to pay in order to beat it is ridiculous. You can go see for yourself at http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_spc2The only system on the whole page that beats it was over twice the price per MBPS. Very sweet for Oracle. So let's see, the 7420 is the fastest per $. The 7420 is the cheapest per MBPS. The 7420 has incredible, built-in features, management services, analytics, and protocols. It's extremely stable and as a cluster has no single point of failure. It won the Storage Magazine award for best NAS system this year. So how long will it be before it's the number 1 NAS system in the market? What are the biggest hurdles still stopping the widespread adoption of the ZFSSA? From what I see, it's three things: 1. Administrator's comfort level with older legacy systems. 2. Politics 3. Past issues with Oracle Support.   I see all of these issues crop up regularly. Number 1 just takes time and education. Number 3 takes time with our new, better, and growing support team. many of them came from Oracle and there were growing pains when they went from a straight software-model to having to also support hardware. Number 2 is tricky, but it's the job of the sales teams to break through the internal politics and help their clients see the value in oracle hardware systems. Benchmarks like this will help.

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• Fun tips with Analytics

  - by user12620172

  If you read this blog, I am assuming you are at least familiar with the Analytic functions in the ZFSSA. They are basically amazing, very powerful and deep. However, you may not be aware of some great, hidden functions inside the Analytic screen. Once you open a metric, the toolbar looks like this: Now, I’m not going over every tool, as we have done that before, and you can hover your mouse over them and they will tell you what they do. But…. Check this out. Open a metric (CPU Percent Utilization works fine), and click on the “Hour” button, which is the 2nd clock icon. That’s easy, you are now looking at the last hour of data. Now, hold down your ‘Shift’ key, and click it again. Now you are looking at 2 hours of data. Hold down Shift and click it again, and you are looking at 3 hours of data. Are you catching on yet? You can do this with not only the ‘Hour’ button, but also with the ‘Minute’, ‘Day’, ‘Week’, and the ‘Month’ buttons. Very cool. It also works with the ‘Show Minimum’ and ‘Show Maximum’ buttons, allowing you to go to the next iteration of either of those. One last button you can Shift-click is the handy ‘Drill’ button. This button usually drills down on one specific aspect of your metric. If you Shift-click it, it will display a “Rainbow Highlight” of the current metric. This works best if this metric has many ‘Range Average’ items in the left-hand window. Give it a shot. Also, one will sometimes click on a certain second of data in the graph, like this:  In this case, I clicked 4:57 and 21 seconds, and the 'Range Average' on the left went away, and was replaced by the time stamp. It seems at this point to some people that you are now stuck, and can not get back to an average for the whole chart. However, you can actually click on the actual time stamp of "4:57:21" right above the chart. Even though your mouse does not change into the typical browser finger that most links look like, you can click it, and it will change your range back to the full metric. Another trick you may like is to save a certain view or look of a group of graphs. Most of you know you can save a worksheet, but did you know you could Sync them, Pause them, and then Save it? This will save the paused state, allowing you to view it forever the way you see it now.  Heatmaps. Heatmaps are cool, and look like this:  Some metrics use them and some don't. If you have one, and wish to zoom it vertically, try this. Open a heatmap metric like my example above (I believe every metric that deals with latency will show as a heatmap). Select one or two of the ranges on the left. Click the "Change Outlier Elimination" button. Click it again and check out what it does.  Enjoy. Perhaps my next blog entry will be the best Analytic metrics to keep your eyes on, and how you can use the Alerts feature to watch them for you. Steve 

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• Using all Ten IO slots on a 7420

  - by user12620172

  So I had the opportunity recently to actually use up all ten slots in a clustered 7420 system. This actually uses 20 slots, or 22 if you count the clusteron card. I thought it was interesting enough to share here. This is at one of my clients here in southern California. You can see the picture below. We have four SAS HBAs instead of the usual two. This is becuase we wanted to split up the back-end taffic for different workloads. We have a set of disk trays coming from two SAS cards for nothing but Exadata backups. Then, we have a different set of disk trays coming off of the other two SAS cards for non-Exadata workloads, such as regular user file storage. We have 2 Infiniband cards which allow us to do a full mesh directly into the back of the nearby, production Exadata, specifically for fast backups and restores over IB. You can see a 3rd IB card here, which is going to be connected to a non-production Exadata for slower backups and restores from it.The 10Gig card is for client connectivity, allowing other, non-Exadata Oracle databases to make use of the many snapshots and clones that can now be created using the RMAN copies from the original production database coming off the Exadata. This allows for a good number of test and development Oracle databases to use these clones without effecting performance of the Exadata at all.We also have a couple FC HBAs, both for NDMP backups to an Oracle/StorageTek tape library and also for FC clients to come in and use some storage on the 7420.  Now, if you are adding more cards to your 7420, be aware of which cards you can place in which slots. See the bottom graphic just below the photo.  Note that the slots are numbered 0-4 for the first 5 cards, then the "C" slots which is the dedicated Cluster card (called the Clustron), and then another 5 slots numbered 5-9. Some rules for the slots: Slots 1 & 8 are automatically populated with the two default SAS cards. The only other slots you can add SAS cards to are 2 & 7. Slots 0 and 9 can only hold FC cards. Nothing else. So if you have four SAS cards, you are now down to only four more slots for your 10Gig and IB cards. Be sure not to waste one of these slots on a FC card, which can go into 0 or 9, instead.  If at all possible, slots should be populated in this order: 9, 0, 7, 2, 6, 3, 5, 4

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• Hybrid Columnar Compression

  - by user12620172

  You heard me in the past talk about the HCC feature for Oracle databases. Hybrid Columnar Compression is a fantastic, built-in, free feature of Oracle 11Gr2. One used to need an Exadata to make use of it. However, last October, Oracle opened it up and now allows it to work on ANY Oracle DB server running 11Gr2, as long as the storage behind it is a ZFSSA for DNFS, or an Axiom for FC. If you're not sure why this is so cool or what HCC can do for your Oracle database, please check out this presentation. In it, Art will explain HCC, show you what it does, and give you a great idea why it's such a game-changer for those holding lots of historical DB data. Did I mention it's free? Click here: http://hcc.zanghosting.com/hcc-demo-swf.html

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