I came by a refurbished Oracle ZFS Storage 7420 server which is a product of Oracle’s line of ZFS Storage Appliance. Apart to 7420 server the system needs a shelf. A bit more info about the line is here:
Servers:
Some documentation is here and here and there is also a simulator here.
I am wondering if you have any experience with this system. I am particularly interested in understanding the following subjects:
how is the update process designed, does one need any special license to update the older refurbished version to the most up to date one or maybe the update is automatic based on already installed system, or are there maybe any stickers that are useful for this process;
is it somehow possible to run Storj StorageNode on this system directly on 7420 server or one needs an additional server specifically destined for virtual machines and/or containers - if this would be the case how would it impact StorageNode performance;
is it possible to install any other operating system on 7420 server or there might be rather some compatibility issues;
is it possible to use any other shelf with 7420 server or only the ones designed by Oracle would work.
Sorry for such basic questions but I do not have much experience with professional servers and in general it is a relatively new topic for me.
Though not directly answering the questions one of the issues with any Sun/Oracle servers is you need to have the machine on a support contract to download any firmware or driver updates.
To my mind this makes them largely unusable.
I had a look at the specs and you really may NOT want to run this thing.
Power Dissipation
Max power consumption: 1800 W
Max heat output: 6143 BTU/h
Yes, Oracle systems generally go for very low prices used precisely because of the problem with downloading updates.
SPARC systems can go for silly prices sometimes though if they are needed for legacy support. Machines like the Sun Blade 2500 and Ultra 45 can fetch very good prices.
Sun Blade 1000 and 2000 use FC-AL disks so they tend to go for a bit lower price now.
I still do have some Sun/Oracle systems in my homelab.
I do Debian kernel testing for Debian Ultra SPARC systems plus I have a Sun Ray 2 thin client I like to use so I have a Solaris 10 system around to run that off.
Back in Australia I still have a Sun Blade 1000 and Sun Ultra 80 in storage. I know the Ultra 80 has power supply issues but it is a high end config with quad cpu’s and max ram. I used to have a lot more machines before my brother decided to toss them out in the garbage without discussion.
I have one Sun server. It works well enough and I usually do not care about updates, but it started developing a problem where it would randomly reboot (time between reboots could be 3 months, could be 30 minutes), so I cannot really use it for something that requires availability.
@penfold
I guess, I got you. I have seen those Sparc based machines, however, I admit I have not explored this subject yet. The ones that are available in my regions are SUN ORACLE SPARC T4-1 (SPARC T4 SME 1914 8-Core 64 Threads). You really think that it is a total garbage or you are just smiling? And is storj supported on SPARC machines at all?
In general, I was focusing on Intel powered ones. The one that took my attention was based on 4 x Xeon e7-4820 so really old I believe 2011 vintage and it was silly cheap with about 300G of RAM. I have also seen a bit newer versions with more up to date Xeons and pretty good prices, some even brand new, and I was thinking that the newer ones would be my choice … if at all.
In general I like how Sun / Oracle racks look like and I like the look of Oracle servers as well. I have to admit that also the software stack took my attention and I plan to install Oracle ZFS Storage Simulator in a virtual machine soon.
The limitation is there is limited Go support on Sparc.
Though at least one person did port Go to Solaris 11.
So yes, theoretically you might be able to get Storj to work on the T4-1
Not via docker however. As Solaris uses zones.
I despise Oracle as a company - but I did love Sun. My first Sun box at home was a Sparcstation 2 and at one point I had over 20 machines of various types up to a Sun E450 and an E3500.
My rack was full of E220R,E420R,E280R and V240’s. lol
But my first love architecture wise has always been Alpha and DEC/Digital Equipment Corporation hardware. The DECstation MIPS systems were what introduced me to Unix so I have very fond memory of them. Plus i even supported VAX hardware for a while. I was even briefly involved in the Linux port to Vax hardware.
Indeed, this was a theoretical question or to be more precise, purely out of curiosity question. The way you described it, it seems just too much trouble. But thank you very much for this brief explanation.
Why is that? I might be a bit biased but I like Oracle. It is a pretty cool company. Not the biggest one but I would say always at the forefront.
Anyway, do you have any experience with Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance [some basic documentation here]? How would you compare it to TrueNas Scale? And above all, do you think that if buying refurbished Oracle ZFS Storage 7420 server, any version, even the old one would be working on this server or not?
Sorry for such detailed questions but I would like to gather as much practical info about this or similar Oracle storage systems as possible. And hoping that maybe some direct users or owners or people with direct knowledge about those systems here?
And of course I should probably add that I am very much interested in @arrogantrabbit 's extensive opinion on the topic of refurbished Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance setup, especially with a view and particular focus on its native cache abilities and entire filesystem transfer technologies. :- )
In part it is due to them not making BIOS and firmware updates available. Also, you need a support contract just to access security patches. Neither Windows or Linux does that. But also because of the way they dismantled all the meaningful Sun Projects - including Solaris. I have also had some poor experiences with the ir DB product as well. Plus Oracle are now going after companies for Java licenses and doing things like demanding companies pay for a license for all staff even when their might be one computer licensed for java. They have also started doing this with virtualbox as well. So, no I am not a fan of their business practices.
No I don’t have experience, but I just would not use their hardware for that role. Like i said you won’t have any access to patches or updates so why would I use that system when I could use TrueNAS or something else and be fully updated. When my ESXi went EoL I didn’t stay on something that was not going to be patched any more. I migrated to Proxmox. When Exchange 2013 went EoL I migrated to Exchange 2016. For me it is an important consideration to run up to date systems that are patched as much as possible. If I do run something I can’t patch -like my Sol 10 system I don’t leave it on 24/7 but run it when I need it and turn it off after. You could not do that with a box running Storj.
Yep, I got it. The updates were my main concern. Maybe I was not so concerned about BIOS and firmware - those things are usually pretty solid - but based on your information I doubt it would be possible to run the latest version of Oracle ZFS Storage Apliance on the old hardware. Not sure if it is possible to run the old version at all. I will try to contact some companies tomorrow in order to gather some additional info. My main interest currently is, how compatibile are the old Oracle systems with standard Linux distributions.
As for now, I am just running Oracle ZFS Storage Apliance Simulator on VMWorkstation. It seems to be based on SunOS 5.11 and it looks pretty good. I have been reading that it runs well on ESXi (never tried that) and that it is like a fully functional product (of course if you are interested in virtualization). Based on the info you just provided I guess this ESXi thing must be licensed so it is a major drawback. Not sure what other virtualization platforms will be supporting it. In plus, it seems that the analytics are great and it seems to be easy to configure.
As for the company and your comments. I believe they always have been doing a lot of open source stuff including Linux contributions. As I mentioned before it is not the largest IT company on the market. And, well, in general, it is “for profit” entity so the actions are justifiable to some extend. Everybody does that. Lets take for example recent actions of Red Hat wrt to RHEL. I would say even worse behavior. As for Sun and Oracle. Despite some product overlaps like for example in the area of databases, as far as I know, there always have been good relations between those two companies. Even before the merger. And a lot of people found a new home after the merger was finalized.
EDIT: I just read that there is a free version of ESXi for personal use called “VMware vSphere Hypervisor”. This is a totally new topic for me. I have to do some additional reading about this stuff.
Actually, BIOS has been my main issue. I have a SUN X2100 1U server here and on the version of BIOS it had it would not work with 1TB SATA drives or larger. I was able to get the update from someone who maintained an archive of Sun systems and after update the drive just worked. I didn’t end up using the X2100 though as it was just too loud. NOT wife friendly considering our bedroom is just outside the office. Instead I ran Sol 10 on my X2100M1 which is much. much quieter. BIOS has also been an issue if I wanted to do CPU upgrades.
ESXi can be used for free but you don’t get access to some features and there are CPU core limits in place now. With Proxmox you get access to everything including HA features. Under Proxmox I can run a full HA cluster with failover - legally - for free. I just don’t get that with Esxi. It’s a no brainer for me.
I should add VMware has a tendency to EOL hardware support as well - which Proxmox will continue support for. A good example of this is VMware retiring support for Fusion I/O flash drives.
Wendel at Level1 techs did a video about VMware retiring support for perfectly good hardware.
But I can’t find the link now.
Yeah, now I understand your concerns related to BIOS. Many thanks for the tip about Proxmox. Also for this whole discussion, which Im finding interesting with a lot of topics being new for me.
