Unified Storage Simulator
Recently I had a chance to fiddle with Sun Storage 7000 Simulator and was totally amazed about this product. It’s absolutely fantastic and awesome because it gives everyone an opportunity to study and familiarize with Sun 7xxx storage appliance just by the means of VirtualBox (or VMWare). Once you boot and go through the initial configuration you will be presented with 15 virtual disks which you could create filesystems and/or LUNs on and share them in whatever manner you prefer: iSCSI, WebDAV, NFS, CIFS, FTP, NDMP.
Initially I was thinking about giving a step-by-step installation and configuration review but once I went through it by myself I cast aside this idea because of its simplicity and plainness. It just that easy and straightforward. More than that, it comes with an easy to understand documentation but if you prefer to use CLI don’t think of being deprived: tab completion and “help command” just don’t give you a single chance to get lost and confused.
Web interface is certainly more friendly and in my opinion it is your day-to-day assistant and the place you will do the most part of you work from. But all the background and cron job scripts will definitely be pumped through CLI.
And of course I just can’t pass over in silence the notorious Analytics feature. It’s epical! From a single menu, have no idea what the DTRACE is, you could drill down to the very source of your problem by identifying the culprit no matter on what tier it is. View the data on-line and in real-time, analyze CPUs, Caches, Disks, Protocols broken down by dozens of metrics i.e type of operations (read or write), clients, files, latency an much much more. Just see it and spend some time playing with it.