Openindiana vs Nexentastor vs FreeNAS
By Alex Friday, 11th May 2012
In my previous post I gave a (very) high level overview of ZFS and why I think it is a solid foundation for vCluster.
What I did not say though, was why we chose OpenIndiana over the other operating systems offering ZFS.
Just before Sun was bought by Oracle, Solaris came in 2 flavours. Solaris and Opensolaris. As the name suggests, OpenSolaris was open source and Solaris was the closed source variant. OpenSolaris was to become proper Solaris some day and development was to be made in the open. Because OpenSolaris was opensource, many different projects were born out of it. Nexetnta made a storage appliance. Belenix was a generic desktop with KDE. StormOS was a simple desktop with Xfce. FreeBSD which had lost it’s edge to Linux over the years, took the chance and ported ZFS with great success. Joyent based their cloud 100% on Opensolaris. They even offer their version, called SmartOS, free to download and use in production.
Alas, Sun was bought by Oracle, Oracle closed the Solaris source code and open development of OpenSolaris ended.
read more…
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An introduction to ZFS
By Alex Friday, 11th May 2012
One major part of the new vCluster release is storage. As you may know, vCluster uses NFS extensively, so we want to make sure that it works reliably. Reliability means that the data stored is always available, meaning that the server should be able to handle the load and be stable, but also that the data is written correctly and consistently on disk. We also need some kind of replication for backups and maybe fail over.
There are lots of systems we could use to serve NFS. There is Linux of course, FreeBSD, OpenIndiana and a slew of commercial solutions from companies like EMC, NetAPP, HP, Dell etc. Looking around and testing various solutions we decided that Openindiana is the best solution for our needs. The main reason is ZFS.
Some background
ZFS is a filesystem originally developed by Sun Microsystems. It was released in late 2005 in the development builds of Solaris. When it was released it obliterated anything freely available at the time. It had features that where not even in the radar of other filesystems. read more…
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Fake Corsair USB sticks
By Alex Thursday, 10th May 2012
Some days ago we ordered some 8GB USB sticks for our custom made storage systems (I’ll write several blog posts about this later). The sticks were Corsair Flash Voyager 8GB. I personally have one, albeit 4GB, and Ihave been using these for years now with great success.
When the sticks arrived, I opened one of them and I noticed something strange. The stick was smaller, lighter, the logo was a bit off and the colour of the stick was different.
Spot the fake:
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Work Experience at CatN
By Jake Garrad Friday, 23rd March 2012
This week I’ve been working at Fubra Ltd and focusing on the design side of things. I’ve been working with Nick mainly. Although I didn’t have a major understanding of the technical side of CatN after researching a bit and talking to the developers I began to understand the idea of vClusters and pClusters. When I arrived I was given a task brief for the week, but first I had to research some more about CatN, vClusters and pClusters.
read more…
Posted in Events, Guides, Product Development, Technology, vCluster | No Comments »
Decommission servers; securely destroying data and recycling
By Nicola Asuni Tuesday, 21st February 2012
Server decommissioning with an eye to protecting data and saving the environment
Here at CatN HQ we have invested quite a lot of time, effort and money in upgrading our server capabilities in advance of launching the new version of vCluster on our new infrastructure. One of the consequences of this is that we now have some old servers that need to be decommissioned.
This presents a problem in that there are quite a few regulations that need to be followed with regard to Electronic and Electrical Equipment waste and securely removing data from the disks.
Posted in Hosting, Technology, vCluster | 1 Comment »