{"id":302,"date":"2006-06-12T12:54:00","date_gmt":"2006-06-12T12:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.zerowait.com\/?p=302"},"modified":"2006-06-12T12:54:00","modified_gmt":"2006-06-12T12:54:00","slug":"302","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.zerowait.com\/index.php\/2006\/06\/12\/302\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

When NetApp purchased Spinnaker<\/a> I was startled, as I could not understand the reason behind the purchase. Spinnaker, like Panasas,<\/a> could have been a viable company, but they were both late to the marketplace, and could not get the market acceptance that the Internet boom provided both EMC and NetApp. But Spinnaker had identified a few niche markets, as has Panasas. Additionally, the Spinnaker technology was based on the Andrews File System & the NetApp system is based on BSD. So they really could not be easily integrated. In my humble opinion, Panasas would have made more sense to purchase from a technology point of view for NetApp. So, I was very interested in reading this article by Chris Mellor over the weekend.<\/p>\n

<\/span> <\/p>\n

Gigabit Ethernet clustering just doesn’t give you the performance and future headroom that Infiniband does. <\/a><\/p>\n

Anderson says: “NetApp uses Infiniband to cluster two nodes. When NetApp bought Spinnaker it then made a mistake. It tried to add features out of the Spinnaker product into ONTAP. But clustering can’t be done that way; it has to be in the DNA of the system. NetApp’s approach didn’t work. Two years ago NetApp reversed direction. Dave Hitz (NetApp CEO) announced that Data ONTAP GX is a Spinnaker foundation with NetApp features added to it.” <\/a><\/p>\n

Anderson added this comment: “(Data ONTAP GX) is namespace organisation. It’s not clustering. It’s RAID behind the veil and can still take eight hours to rebuild a disk. They’ll be performance problems downstream. It’s a bandaid. It’s a total kluge.” <\/a><\/p>\n

With Isilon file data and parity data is striped across up to 9 nodes. A failed disk can be re-built in 30 minutes to an hour. In effect, Isilon’s striping technology renders RAID redundant. <\/a><\/p>\n

Anderson says suppliers like Acopia ‘do it in the switch layer. It’s not rich, it’s lightweight.’ Again there will be performance problems downstream. <\/a><\/p>\n

A virtualised pool of NAS resource requires the NAS nodes to be clustered for smooth performance scaling. It also requires N + 2 protection so that the system can recover from two failed disks and not just one. (NetApp’s RAID DP provides protection against two disk failures.) <\/a><\/p>\n


<\/a> <\/p>\n

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When NetApp purchased Spinnaker I was startled, as I could not understand the reason behind the purchase. Spinnaker, like Panasas, could have been a viable company, but they were both late to the marketplace, and could not get the market … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.zerowait.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.zerowait.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.zerowait.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.zerowait.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.zerowait.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.zerowait.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.zerowait.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.zerowait.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.zerowait.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}