Hybrid Storage Pool Model for Sun Storage 7000
Unified Storage System Family

Chris began with a primer on ZFS, sharing the basic concepts and
bringing the filesystem features to life and what they bring to the
Amber Road platform. He also provided an overview of the Unified
Storage System’s cache architecture, noting the adaptive replacement
cache and the ZFS intent log, and the fault tolerance and performance
these features offer the 7000 series.

Chris picked up the core difference between Amber Road and traditional
storage devices. "In a typical general storage array there will be LUNs
presented to hosts which are very active, some moderately active and
some totally inactive." He noted that Amber Road provides and
alternative to the traditional "Long Tail"
model, highlighting
"fronting
disk access with SSD ensures that high performance is
dynamically provided to LUNs as it is needed."

Overall, Chris is positive about the architectural choices made for
Amber Road and was unable to find fault via his evaluation. "I can say
that in the testing I performed, the array coped easily with the
workload I threw at it," he stated.

Chris’ next post will be an in-depth look at the analytics provided by
Amber Road and how it allows detailed device reporting.