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From the very beginning the IT infrastructure at OurStage, an online music discovery company, had been a Linux shop. It ran its production site and applications servers on Tyan and Supermicro hardware with CentOS, a Linux distribution based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Developers use Ruby on Rails as a Web application framework.

About six months after going live with its Web site in May 2007, OurStage began having problems with storage I/O performance on its iSCSI server. "Functionally, Linux NFS works as advertised," says Mark Niedzielski, infrastructure manager at OurStage. "Under load, however, problems such as client- side retries started to show up. After a couple of rounds of tuning, we found that it wasn't a tuning problem but rather sluggish NFS behavior."

With Web traffic rising rapidly, it was time to start looking at alternative storage solutions. Niedzielski had prior experience with the Solaris Operating System, but not with ZFS, the file system available in both Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris. "I had read quite a bit about ZFS and was aware of the ZFS promise. When I looked at the types of systems people were using with ZFS, they were very much in the class of what were trying to do, so that made it an obvious choice to investigate." says Niedzielski.

The company built several test systems based on OpenSolaris 2008.05, eventually settling on a Supermicro system that uses a Marvell chipset. "We chose the hardware based on the basic chipsets used in the Sun Fire X4500," says Niedzielski. After testing proved that OpenSolaris provided better load-balancing capabilities and could scale easily to meet future needs, it was an easy decision for the company to switch its production storage systems to the OpenSolaris platform. Since then, it has built two more storage servers supporting 16TB each."OpenSolaris seems to be a more thorough and hardened implementation than Linux. Compared to Linux XFS and EXT3, our experience with ZFS has been very good; we're very pleased. It solved all the original problems we were looking to get rid of," says David Pascoe, vice president of operations at OurStage.

Ease of management was an important factor for OurStage. "With ZFS, I can manipulate large numbers of disks easily and predictably with just one tool set," says Niedzielski. "In contrast, to manage a Linux system, separate tools are required for the file system, volume management, RAID hardware, the operating system, and smart monitoring tools. The Linux tools all work together, but that's more by happenstance than by design. One set of tools in ZFS takes care of all of that, top to bottom. And, frankly, in my mind, that's what makes OpenSolaris an enterprise solution."

With OpenSolaris, OurStage was able to deploy fewer servers, keeping hardware and administration costs down and the storage environment simple. "We like to keep administration time to an absolute minimum - near zero," says Pascoe. "OpenSolaris saves us time by not having to touch it; it just works, day in and day out."

Innovative technology contributed to the company's choice of OpenSolaris and will play a role in its future, too. "We're interested in GlassFish as a possible Web server alternative to Mongrel, which is what we use today for Ruby on Rails," says Niedzielski. "I'm also interested in using OpenSolaris as the application server; I want to see what DTrace can do for us." He says that scaling a Ruby on Rails Web site is complex because it's very difficult to replicate the types and range of user traffic of a dynamic Web site in a test environment. "Having additional tools such as DTrace to instrument a running system is a tremendous opportunity and could potentially solve that problem." In summary, he says "We are very pleased with OpenSolaris. In the beginning, we wanted to see what it could do for us. In the end, we didn't need to look for other solutions. OpenSolaris provided us with exactly what we needed."

 
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