OneFS 7
Isilon’s latest operating system emerged from beta in Q4
2013. During the beta Isilon chose the
name Mavericks, which was a departure from many years of naming their betas
after chillis.
As OneFS 7 has now reached the level of maturity where it
will ship by default on new hardware, it seems a good time to see if OneFS 7 is
a scorching Naga or a tepid Bell Pepper.
As someone who has used OneFS for many years, there are a
number of key features in OneFS7 that jump out at me:
Roles-based Administration – Think of the current
implementation very much as version 1, Isilon will build on this implementation
and refine the granularity of permissions further with future releases, but
even in its current incarnation, I am more than pleased to see it in the
product.
Fast snapshot restoration, writable snapshots and file
cloning. All “enterprise” features that
improve the ability for Isilon to complete in general purpose storage
deployments against NetApp and others.
The excellent SyncIQ replication technology has been
enhanced though the implementation of push-button failover / failback (this is
something I need to spend more time playing with, but early signs are
promising).
The IO capabilities of the filesystem have taken a step
forward with much focus being placed on concurrent and sequential file access,
but also improvements to IO latency – motivated in no small part by hopes of
hosting VMware deployments on the platform.
The term “Endurant Cache” has been coined to cover Isilon’s new approach
to caching and I am looking forward to delving into this in more detail in the
near future.
Unsurprisingly tighter integration with VMware is a
much-highlighted feature of OneFS 7.
Take VAAI and VASA APIs, sprinkle in some Endurant Cache, Metadata
Acceleration (via SSD’s) and per-file cloning and you have a platform that is
better placed to handle VMware workloads.
But critically still no deduplication or read-acceleration to see off
boot storms (read as PAM cards) to put their VMware solution on a par with
NetApp.
It would also be unfair not to comment on the continued progress
being made by Likewise, the company acquired by Isilon in early 2012.
Likewise have done a great job in making the SMB/SMB2 implementation
on Isilon far better than it was a couple of major revisions back, there is
still some way to go until the “unified” protocol access to the Isilon is a
good as some other platforms, but things are certainly going in the right
direction.
Wrapping It Up
So where are we with OneFS7, that probably depends on your
use case.
In a Windows-centric environment, OneFS7 is probably a
better fit that 6.5.x. SMB / SMB2 performance
should be much better and more tuneable.
In a UNIX-heavy environment, I would still favour OneFS
6.5.x, Endurant cache will help in many circumstances,
but I’ve also heard that some operations may be slower in the current 7.0.x
builds.
Undoubtedly OneFS7 is an improvement on OneFS6.5 and is testament to the significant investment that EMC continue to make into this true scale-out storage platform, but in my
opinion it's still a little too new for prime-time. There will certainly be deployment scenarios
where you could deploy and run today (Windows-centric or VMware), outside of
those, you’d need to be a Maverick to deploy into production so soon after
launch.
Based on previous Isilon release schedules, I would expect a
substantial OneFS 7 point release by Q4 2013 that will bring with it additional
features and stability. In the mean
time, I would recommend that Isilon customer grab a copy of the new OS and try
it where they can.
I'll post in more detail about the new feature in future blog posts.
