On Jan 5, 2011, at 4:14 PM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote: >> From: Richard Elling [mailto:richard.ell...@nexenta.com] >> >>> I'll agree to call Nexenta "a major commerical interest," in regards to >> contribution to the open source ZFS tree, if they become an officially >> supported OS on Dell, HP, and/or IBM hardware. >> >> NexentaStor is officially supported on Dell, HP, and IBM hardware. The > only >> question is, "what is your definition of 'support'"? Many NexentaStor > > I don't want to argue about this, but I'll just try to clarify what I meant: > > Presently, I have a dell server with officially supported solaris, and it's > as unreliable as pure junk. It's just the backup server, so I'm free to > frequently create & destroy it... And as such, I frequently do recreate and > destroy it. It is entirely stable running RHEL (centos) because Dell and > RedHat have a partnership with a serious number of human beings and machines > looking for and fixing any compatibility issues. For my solaris > instability, I blame the fact that solaris developers don't do significant > quality assurance on non-sun hardware. To become "officially" compatible, > the whole qualification process is like this: Somebody installs it, doesn't > see any problems, and then calls it "certified." They reformat with > something else, and move on. They don't build their business on that > platform, so they don't detect stability issues like the ones reported... > System crashes once per week and so forth. Solaris therefore passes the > test, and becomes one of the options available on the drop-down menu for > OSes with a new server. (Of course that's been discontinued by oracle, but > that's how it was in the past.)
If I understand correctly, you want Dell, HP, and IBM to run OSes other than Microsoft and RHEL. For the thousands of other OSes out there, this is a significant barrier to entry. One can argue that the most significant innovations in the past 5 years came from none of those companies -- they came from Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and the other innovators who did not spend their efforts trying to beat Microsoft and get into the manufacturing floor of the big vendors. > Developers need to "eat their own food." I agree, but neither Dell, HP, nor IBM develop Windows... > Smoke your own crack. Hardware > engineers at Dell need to actually use your OS on their hardware, for their > development efforts. I would be willing to bet Sun hardware engineers use a > significant percentage of solaris servers for their work... And guess what > solaris engineers don't use? Non-sun hardware. I'm not sure of the current state, but many of the Solaris engineers develop on laptops and Sun did not offer a laptop product line. > Pretty safe bet you won't > find any Dell servers in the server room where solaris developers do their > thing. You will find them where Nexenta developers live :-) > If you want to be taken seriously as an alternative storage option, you've > got to at LEAST be listed as a factory-distributed OS that is an option to > ship with the new server, and THEN, when people such as myself buy those > things, we've got to have a good enough experience that we don't all bitch > and flame about it afterward. Wait a minute... this is patently false. The big storage vendors: NetApp, EMC, Hitachi, Fujitsu, LSI... none run on HP, IBM, or Dell servers. > Nexenta, you need a real and serious partnership with Dell, HP, IBM. Get > their developers to run YOUR OS on the servers which they use for > development. Get them to sell your product bundled with their product. And > dedicate real and serious engineering into bugfixes working with customers, > to truly identify root causes of instability, with a real OS development and > engineering and support group. It's got to be STABLE, that's the #1 > requirement. There are many marketing activities are in progress towards this end. One of Nexenta's major OEMs (Compellent) is being purchased by Dell. The deal is not done, so there is no public information on future plans, to my knowledge. > I previously made the comparison... Even close-source solaris & ZFS is a > better alternative to close-source netapp & wafl. So for now, those are the > only two enterprise supportable options I'm willing to stake my career on, > and I'll buy Sun hardware with Solaris. But I really wish I could feel > confident buying a cheaper Dell server and running ZFS on it. Nexenta, if > you make yourself look like a serious competitor against solaris, and really > truly form an awesome stable partnership with Dell, I will happily buy your > stuff instead of Oracle. Even if you are a little behind in feature > offering. But I will not buy your stuff if I can't feel perfectly confident > in its stability. I can assure you that we take stability very seriously. And since you seem to think the big box vendors are infallible, a sampling of those things we (Nexenta) have to live with: http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=329290&prodSeriesId=3690351&swItem=MTX-d56eb5d75f03485dbc32680f62&prodNameId=4094976&swEnvOID=4024&swLang=13&taskId=135&mode=4&idx=2 http://www.intel.com/assets/pdf/specupdate/321324.pdf http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX127395 http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2010-May/042280.html http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/kcs/document?c=us&l=en&s=gen&docid=DSN_619147E926299297E040AE0AB8E103AE&isLegacy=true If you look very far, you will find all vendors have issues and at the end of the day, vendors who integrate other people's products (HP, Dell, IBM) are subject to the same issues that the rest of the industry sees. So when you complain about stability issues, it is incumbent on you to identify the responsible vendor or supplier. There is no one-stop-shop in the x86 market and there hasn't been one for the past 3 decades. > Ever heard the phrase "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." You're the > little guys. If you want to compete against the big guys, you've got to > kick ass. And don't get sued into oblivion. Yes, and since you're finished, you can return that copy of Dummies Guide to Business to the library. > Even today's feature set is perfectly adequate for at least a couple of > years to come. If you put all your effort into stability and bugfixes, > serious partnerships with Dell, HP, IBM, and become extremely professional > looking and stable, with fanatical support... You don't have to worry about > new feature development for some while. Stability is #1 and not > disappearing is a pretty huge threat right now. I think everyone will agree that stability is important. Since I've been at Nexenta, I am pleasantly surprised by the lack of panics or data loss. The current rate at Nexenta is far lower than the rates I saw at Sun (and yes, I did have access to the data). > Based on my experience, I would not recommend buying Dell with Solaris, even > if that were still an option. If you want solaris, buy sun/oracle hardware, > because then you can actually expect it to work reliably. And if solaris > isn't stable on dell ... then all the solaris derivatives including nexenta > can't be trusted either, no matter how much you claim it's "supported." Oracle "solves" this problem by not making the support details public... you have to have an account and service contract to see the dirty laundry details. > Show me the HCL, and show me the partnership between your software engineers > and Dell's hardware engineers. Uhm... what makes you think Dell invests in hardware development? Dell is a manufacturer and spends very little on product development. http://stocks.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/jimcramer/CramersMadMoneyRecapItsAlmost2011onWallStreetsCalendarUpdate3.aspx NB. much of Dell's innovation is in business systems and manufacturing, a good thing, but they are not known for pure research, software development, or product development beyond hardware integration. > Make me believe there is a serious and > thorough qualification process. Do a huge volume. Your volume must be > large enough to justify dedicating some engineers to serious bugfix efforts > in the field. Otherwise... When I need to buy something stable... I'm > going to buy solaris on sun hardware, because I know that's thoroughly > tried, tested, and stable. In a former life I worked in the Quality Office at Sun. I'm delighted that you have such a fondness for the products. They are quite good. Of course, NexentaStor works quite nicely on Oracle's Sun x86 systems :-) -- richard _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
