On Mon, 2011-03-21 at 14:56 -0700, Paul B. Henson wrote:
> On 3/18/2011 3:15 PM, Garrett D'Amore wrote:
>
> > c) NCP 4 is still 5-6 months away. We're still developing it.
>
> By the time I do some initial evaluation, then some prototyping, I don't
> anticipate migrating anything production wise until at the earliest
> Christmas break, so that timing shouldn't be a problem. Any thoughts on
> how soon a beta might be available? As it sounds like there will be
> significant changes, it might be better to evaluate with a beta of the
> new stuff rather than the production version of the older stuff. Plus I
> generally tend to break things in unexpected ways ;), so doing that in
> the beta cycle might be beneficial.
I *hate* talking about unreleased product schedules, but I think you can
expect a beta with a month or two, perhaps less. We've already got an
alpha that we've handed out in limited quantities.
>
> > d) NCP 4 will make much more use of the illumos userland, and only
> > use Debian when illumos doesn't have an equivalent.
>
> Given both NCP and OpenIndiana will be based off of illumos, and as of
> version 4 NCP will be migrating as much as possible of the userland to
> solaris as opposed to gnu, other than the differing packaging formats
> what do you feel will distinguish NCP from openindiana? NCP is positioned as
> a bare-bones server, whereas openindiana is trying to be more general
> purpose including desktop use?
NCP is a core-technology thing. Definitely not a general purpose OS at
all, and will be missing all the desktop stuff.
The idea behind NCP is that other distros build on top of, or people who
just want that bare bones OS use it. It comes with debian packaging,
and we do have a bunch of the common server packages (Apache, etc.) set
up, but not everything that you might want.
>
> > e) NCP comes entirely unsupported. NexentaStor is a commercial
> > product with real support behind it, though.
>
> Can you treat NexentaStor like a general purpose operating system, not
> use the management gui, and configure everything from a shell prompt, or
> is it more appliance like and you're locked out from the OS? In other
> words, would it be possible (although not necessarily cost-effective) to
> pay for NexentaStor for the support but treat it like NCP?
Once you dive under the controlled UI (which you can do), you basically
are breaking your support contract.
Going forward, NCP and NS will be more closely synchronized, so you'll
be able to get the same OS, and probably receive patches to it, that you
get with NS, albeit without official support and without the proprietary
add-on features like HA clustering, the management UI,
auto-tiering/auto-sync, etc.
>
> Has your company considered basic support contracts for NCP? I've heard
> from at least one other site that might be interested in something like
> that. We don't need much in the way of handholding, the majority of our
> support calls end up being actual bugs or limitations in solaris. But if
> one of our file servers panics, doesn't import a pool when it boots, and
> crashes every time you try to import it by hand, it would be nice to
> have an engineer available :).
There have been some discussions, but figuring out how to make that
commercially worthwhile is challenging. At some level, our engineers
are busy enough that we'd have to see enough commercial demand here to
justify adding engineers, because the number of calls we would take
would probably go significantly with such a change.
- Garrett
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