Sun Shines on OpenSRS
Here at OpenSRS we use a lot of Sun hardware, mostly multi-core Opteron servers but we have some big SPARC platforms running Oracle as well. Recently, Lucian Florea, our Director of Technical Operations and I went down to the Valley to talk to a small army of senior Sun geeks about the new and noteworthy stuff coming our way and to generally talk about our challenges and how Sun can help us.
Oracle ? MySQL
We’ve been on the path to convert from Oracle to MySQL (or in some cases no database) for a while now. It’s a slow process, but a liberating one. We currently spend quite a lot for Oracle support, which in our experience has always been pretty “hit or miss” in terms of delivering value.
While we were at Sun we spoke with some senior MySQL folks about our challenges in getting from Oracle to MySQL across the whole organization. Today, I’m not 100% sure we’ll ever completely eliminate Oracle at Tucows, but I’m pretty sure we can reduce its overall footprint to one or maybe two services, most notably our finance/sales datacube. It was really great to have the MySQL team there listening to our needs, and working with us on their roadmap.
One of our DBA’s biggest concerns with MySQL is the relative lack of tools. Sun/MySQL have addressed this need with their Enterprise licensing models (which at $40k-100k for our organization’s site license are super-affordable compared to Oracle) with a series of tools to inspect, monitor, and tune a MySQL database, specifically MySQL Enterprise Monitor. I haven’t used Enterprise Monitor yet, but it looks at first blush like a very useful tool for managing MySQL across your enterprise without having to hand-craft health checks of every sort.
Sun Storage
Today, we’re a big Netapp shop. We came to Netapp from the convoluted and expensive world of SAN and fibre storage infrastructure. I’ll disclose here that I’ve liked the Netapp storage products for a long time, long before I joined Tucows. But we only landed on Netapp here after testing many storage providers out there for their performance profile in our particular environments. We tested Sun’s Thumper, some StorageTek devices, Isilon, Netapp, and even Linux NFS against each other to find the best performers in terms of high availability and raw throughput (especially with respect to billions of small files) and the Netapp products were clear winners in every test.
This may soon change. Netapp has two Achilles’ heels: their astronomical cost and their proprietary and closed nature.
While I was at Sun we talked excitedly about their new OpenStorage products, being announced November 10. I’m not sure how much I can say about this technology yet. There are clues on Sun’s site and in an interview with Mike Shapiro. Sun is positioned to win by attacking both of Netapp’s vulnerabilities by providing a low-cost, high-performance and open storage platform. I can’t wait to get my eval units in to play with!
One of the other really exciting components of the open storage products coming to market is a dtrace-like utility for examining your storage infrastructure and really drilling down on what’s going on. This is important to us, like many others, as we continue to tune and improve our systems, to help find storage bottlenecks and inefficiencies. By being able to find hotspots, tune our code and retest, we can immediately see if our changes are having the desired results. This is really a very cool tool. Way to go Mike and team!
Of course, while I’m excited about the new Sun open storage offerings, before they unseat the incumbent, they’ll have to prove themselves in our test lab, and then again in a dev/qa environment, and then again in a production test environment, before they’d have the chance to see use in production.
Other Stuff…
While we were at Sun we also talked to some other folks about topics that weren’t as pressing for us, but still pretty cool in their own right.
We had a bit of a technology tour of Sun’s hardware. The SunRay platform, while not new, is still holding on, and has some interesting bells and whistles now. Project Blackbox, the containerized datacentre, is very cool and worth checking out if you’re not aware of it.
Back on the storage front, we spoke with Glenn and Glenn about Project Celeste. Celeste is a project in Sun Labs (and probably a fair way away from being ready for enterprise production-land), that is a “high availability peer-to-peer data store with semantics for file creation, arbitrary read and write, and deletion”. Seems like everyone is hungry for an open source clustered file system. We are definitely watching for one 
In Closing
Evaluating solutions and re-evaluating solutions as they evolve to keep our network and services as efficient as possible is one of the best parts of my job. Thanks to Sun for the exciting look at the technology coming down the pipe and for listening to our wants and needs.