Keep in mind that Ibrix is a NAS only solution.
Like Nexenta, Exanet, etc.. All are great but Scalable NAS solution that can run on any commodity hardware.

You have some Internet oriented file systems for cloud storage like HDFS (Hadoop) and more..

Solutions Like Lustre, Gluster, GPFS are tuned for the HPC world (although GPFS actually started as a media file system). They are SAN/Ethernet based shared file systems.

This means they are tuned for HPC style of IO characteristics of large throughput, mostly sequential. They are not tuned to handle small/random IOps.

StorNext is heterogeneous file system that gives you shared SAN based file system with NAS capabilities, or their Own propriety protocol (DLC).

The Great thing about StorNext is its ability to handle different kind of work flows, and provide both SAN & NAS access, and handle larger variety of IO patterns. It does have its weaknesses , where lacking on Functionallity (snapshots for example, NAS features..) but overall it is a good, easy to manage product.

So my bottom line here, is that you have to clarify to us & your team what kind of usage and IO characteristic are you looking to get from this file/storage solution & than choose the right product to do it, and not vice versa..

You need to pin-point the requirement, and than see how each of the suggested solutions can/cannot answer these needs.

What you’ve likely lost with the IBRIX acquisition (and what StorNext has committed to delivering through years of product evolution and acquisition, e.g. ADIC –> Quantum) is agnosticism. StorNext has allowed us to scale a HPC/HA computing architecture from a handful of TB to over 1.5 PB. During that time we have moved data centers twice – once across campus, then across metro. We have integrated or migrated off of at least 4 separate brands of storage subsystems and have a hybrid of multiple vendors/tiers of storage in a single, managed namepace. With proper design and engineering, performance on the filesystem expands with capacity growth. And integration of deduplication in the Storage Manager has saved us 7-figures in CAPEX on nearline capacity.

Definitely worth considering if you’re uncomfortable with the potential vendor lock-in presented by this acquisition.

-DG
USA

We demonstrated 1GB/s NFS a few weeks ago (no press release or anything like that) for 1 client and 1 server over a single 10GbE NIC. Gluster lets us do this over 10GbE, and Infiniband (which does not appear to be on the wane in the least in HPC).

If you are open to other-than-big-names, you have a pretty good shot at solving this problem. If you are stuck with only big names, you have to take what they can deliver.

It is important to assess CAP and OPEX prior to any purchase, as systems with lower initial acquisition costs may often require significant investment down the road in management, professional services and pricey upgrades. These “hidden costs” frequently add up to be much more costly over time than deploying systems that may appear slightly more expensive at the outset, but require very little time and resource investment to manage, thus delivering better TCO and ROI over the short and long term.
- Lucas Welch, Isilon Systems

If you are interested in SW-only performance clustered file systems, one may wish to look towards IBM GPFS, also, to compare prices. Off in open sauce land, I’m hearing that Gluster is on the upswing (dodges the metadata controller problem), although I can imagine that an only-recently upscaled open source platform is not the thing to use for someone stressing over availability.

Is there some reason you haven’t gone the Red Hat GFS route?

As a side note, if your Sun HW is x86 stuff don’t stress it. x86 stuff is “commodity,” which is to say to me, one slab of x86 pork is like another. If your systems were all white boxes, would you be stressin’? No.

Joe Kraska
San Diego CA
USA