Around The Block Blog

by Liem Nguyen, (former) Director of Communications and Social Media, Dell Storage — August 19, 2010

Many of you know the Compellent zNAS platform is a ZFS-based NAS integrated with the Fluid Data architecture. The zNAS interface unifies file and block storage management and we collaborated on it with our friends over at Nexenta. So it’s no surprise that we’ve been getting questions about how current events in the ZFS community, particularly the leaked Oracle memo on the future of OpenSolaris, will impact zNAS. From the SearchStorage article you can glean Evan Powell’s thoughts on the subject. For the Compellent perspective, I sat down with Troy Presler, our zNAS product marketing manager, to get his reaction to the memo.

LN: It’s been a busy few months for you. How are things going with zNAS?

TP:  We started shipping last quarter and I’m excited about the reception it’s received so far. Customers and channel partners are really happy about the ZFS platform and the scalability of zNAS. And I’m working with a few of them to share their story publicly. Stay tuned as I expect to be able to talk more openly about these companies after they’ve had a chance to fully implement zNAS.

LN:  What are the implications for Compellent due to Oracle’s memo on the Open Solaris community?

TP:  Though Oracle hasn’t said anything publicly about the memo, we have no concerns.  The community of open source developers for OpenSolaris has a long history of maintaining a high level of autonomy and has built an OS that has become an industry-wide mainstay in many products used by many companies.  We expect support and development for ZFS will continue in some form or fashion through OpenSolaris, Illumos or a future, community-supported environment. In addition,  there are indications that Oracle will continue to fund development of Solaris and keep things open but with emphasis on business value first and releasing code only after it does so internally with its developers first.  Sounds like business as usual with a checkpoint stop at the Oracle train station first.

LN: How does this affect zNAS?

TP: Compellent will continue to support and sell the zNAS product with ZFS.  We have a solid partnership with Nexenta around continued ZFS development and support for our zNAS product.  Nothing will change. We are full speed ahead and excited by what the zNAS product offers our customers.  zNAS users can easily manage both blocks and files,  scale capacity without downtime and leverage the Fluid Data features, like automated tiered storage and thin provisioning, that have become synonymous with Compellent.

by Compellent Technologies, — May 06, 2010

Bruce Kornfeld, vice president of marketing, and Marty Sanders, vice president of technology services at Compellent are talking about the company’s unified storage offerings, including the latest introduction of zNAS based on ZFS.

by Liem Nguyen, (former) Director of Communications and Social Media, Dell Storage — April 27, 2010

Today Compellent is pleased to introduce the latest in our unified storage line, the Compellent zNAS , which is our first NAS based on ZFS (Zettabyte file system). Compellent zNAS is ideal for mid-sized and large enterprises with file and block based storage requirements, especially in mixed Unix, Linux and Windows environments.

Why is this important? Because file storage requirements are going through the roof, with analysts like IDC predicting the amount of unstructured data (office docs, videos, graphics files) will increase by more than 60 percent annually through 2012. That's a lot of growth, requiring both granular system intelligence and big file scalability to manage all that data, regardless of size or type, in the most efficient way. The Compellent zNAS was designed with those storage consolidation needs in mind. Here are a few of the product highlights:

• Unified storage management interface - The zNAS interface integrates file and block storage management tasks. For example, an admin can create file shares that are instantly, thinly provisioned on Compellent enterprise SAN. Other data management tasks such as volume deletion, snapshot creation and system analytics are also available from the unified interface  (See sample screenshot)
  
  
• Fluid Data architecture - Regardless of whether the data is written by file-based or block-based applications, the zNAS leverages our Fluid Data architecture to consolidate the data in a virtual pool of storage and provide granular system intelligence to actively manage the data. The solution offers block-based thin provisioning, automated tiered storage, boot from SAN, continuous snapshots and thin replication applications.
• High-performance NAS hardware - The zNAS ships as a single 1U NAS node or a clustered dual configuration. The NAS comes with dual Intel Nehalem processors and memory up to 48 GB. Because each node is diskless, the management software and NAS image boot from the SAN, which means fewer hardware components to deploy, maintain and upgrade.
• Single, scalable platform - The back-end storage consists of the Storage Center controller and enclosures that can support any type of drive such as SSD, SAS, FC or SATA. By leveraging a persistent hardware platform and managing just one pool of storage, enterprises can greatly simplify management, improve performance for their applications, and save money on hardware and associated costs.

If it's ZFS, it's got to be massively scalable

• ZFS is an advanced, highly scalable file system: it’s a 128-bit file system addressing 18 quintillion (1.84 × 1019) times more data than current 64-bit systems.
• The practical limitations on file size and directory entries cannot be defined, so basically you’re bound more by the physical capacity of the unified platform - in Compellent’s case that’s 1,008 disks.
• ZFS has advanced error detection and correction, using end-to-end checksums to authenticate data integrity.
• ZFS has other valuable storage efficiency features such deduplication, which is expected to ship later this year on zNAS (end of Q2/beginning of Q3).

We'll ship the Compellent unified storage solutions with zNAS by the end of June 2010, available only through our global network of channel partners.

For more information, watch the brief zNAS product tour (below) by Troy Presler, the product manager for zNAS.

If you'd like more information on unified storage, join me (@LiemNguyen) and ESG senior analyst Terri McClure (@esganalysttmac)  for the next #SANChat on unified storage at 1:30 pm CDT later today, April 27. We will talk about the benefits of scalable NAS, next-generation unified storage technologies and other storage issues.