Two things I can't stop thinking about: ZFS and Joyent

People often ask me what I’m most excited about technology-wise and I have to be honest that this week it’s two things: ZFS and Joyent. They’re at different levels in the grand scheme of server things but whenever I find myself idle, my mind drifts to them and then buzz buzz buzzes. And I can actually see myself being excited about these for quite sometime (so excuse the use of “this week”).

ZFS

ZFS is Sun’s 128 bit file system (most file systems now are 32 or 64 bit, it’s what limits their size and number of possible files). It was announced about a year ago, has been in development for over 4 years and then this last Halloween found it put into Solaris Express. So it looks like it should be available via there in the next couple of weeks.

ZFS is a file system that among other things has a copy-on-write design with abilities like relatively unlimited and instantaneous read/write snapshots. Because of this plus other things it is very much like Netapp’s WAFL (Write Anywhere File Layout; there is a pdf here ; and our grand systems emperor Jan looooooooooooooves netapp). When you add it’s additional features and a size limit that in order to reach you’d have to comsume all the silicon on the planet Earth, then it’s far to call it a solid advance.

What does ZFS do for us and others? Well, we have a large number of SCSI drives (TBs and TBs worth), SCSI enclosures that can direct connect to several other servers and it then becomes relatively easy to then put together a solid, solid NAS, effectively a “poor man’s netapp”. OK, ok, a frugal man’s Netapp at an entry level price of about 1/10th-1/50th. And that’s the entry level price, when you can reconfigure things that you already have, then it’s even better.

Joyent

Now joyent. Oh nice clean wonderful joyent. I was lucky enough to get a demo yesterday from David, the CEO and Founder, in the lobby of the Hilton San Francisco. And I can tell you that after professionally using (literally) ever application like this over the last decade, this is was the first time that I was done trying something out and really, seriously had no issues with it. Nothing but love. I think 4 minutes into it, my mouth was permanently open and I was siezed by nothing but the desire to start using it even in place of things like Mail.app. And it looks great. Great great great. And what really struck me (as an “executive”) is that this team if anything must be amazingly disciplined and well lead, they had obviously and successfully resisted every little thing that has ended up being irritants in software like this (even at their stage). If they can keep that going as they come up to releasing it then …. Wow.

Among other things, this app is one that finally gets that it has a relational database as a backend (umm … for example, when you access files via WebDAV on your computer, it auto-creates a normal looking file hierarchy from how you tag a file. You don’t have to create “folders” or decide whether a file should be here or there).

And it’s a Rails app

Smart guys.

·:· Posted 5 November 2005, 20:09 by Jason Hoffman to Stuff  |  

  1. I am sure Joyent is wonderful tech. but they are charging $4950.00 for one Joyent Connection box and $65/mo! That’s insane! I do not know… I would need to see it in action and pick a tech’s brain like you did to really appreciate it…

    — JBrickley    6 November 2005, 04:52    #
  2. i can think of many situations where losing even a small amount of your data will cost you much more than $4950 + $65*n where n is a natural number of reasonable magnitude.

    — warren    6 November 2005, 06:58    #
  3. This is exactly what I was looking for. Well, what I’d like to have available for myself: web based yet desktop-accessible webmail, contacts and calendar. Will TxD be adopting Joyent or do you have plans to develop your own solution?

    — AD    7 November 2005, 10:27    #
  4. Funny, just this weekend I learned about Joyent back at Daring Fireball

    — victor    7 November 2005, 18:53    #
  5. well it does seem to be a hardware device that you’re paying for the $5000. I’d like to see the hosted plans (I signed up to be notified). But who knows I’ve been considering just colocating a server and installing Zimbra

    — alexagui    8 November 2005, 17:48    #
  6. oh wait. Zimbra doesn’t have a file/document manager.

    — alexagui    8 November 2005, 17:52    #
  7. I’m with Jason on this one. Joyent is a brilliant product.

    It might not make sense for the tech savvy TextDrive crowd, but I’m sure there a thousands of small businesses out there for whom Joyent is orders of magnitude cheaper than hiring a sysadmin to buy and manage commodity parts for you.

    And it sounds like that $5000 gets you a stellar software package in addition to probably $1200 worth of hardware.

    — Jon Shea    9 November 2005, 15:59    #
  8. Sounds like a great deal. If you’ve ever had to price out licensing, consulting, setup fees, backup, etc., the costs add up quickly. ~5000 + $65/month sounds good.

    — Kelly Jones    22 November 2005, 05:48    #
  9. From the big picture point of view I think it’s a brilliant idea. I run a small office of less than 20 and I’m seriously considering signing up.

    I’m reminded of the debates we used to read on the P-Machine and Textdrive forums about the cost of a CMS. It almost always ended with “well… if you can do it yourself… wtf are you doing here?” “Go build one of your own!”

    — Ray    29 November 2005, 04:27    #
  10. Wow, no one has commented about ZFS! I’m surprised—of the two, ZFS is the much more revolutionary, and could potentially have a larger impact. Speaking of impact … does your last paragraph about ZFS imply that you’ll be experimenting with setting up a ZFS NAS at TextDrive? Oh, that would be lovely! It sure would save a lot of fsck time, among other things.

    — jennyw    1 December 2005, 01:08    #
  11. Ray: I’m reminded of the debates we used to read on the P-Machine … forums about the cost of a CMS

    That’s where I know you from. What’s Rick up to these days, I wonder? All those tar-ry, tar-ry Marlboro nights alpha testing everybody’s CMS but our own, making medieval markup tradeoffs and poking rudely at today’s givens. Seems so long ago. Heck, we even blogged back then. Crazy. These days blogging’s only for other people. Some don’t even have dogs.

    Happy go-to-hell holidays, evahbody. And Joy to the Text*

    LQ

    — Lou Quillio    1 December 2005, 04:46    #