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Date: Thu, 7 Dec 2006 16:49:55 -0800
From: Andrew Sharp <andy.sharp@onstor.com>
To: dl-cougar
Subject: wrangling our CF
Message-ID: <20061207164955.3dd73fbd@ripper.onstor.net>
Organization: Onstor
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I'd like to push the issue of the CF flash, which is actually several
issues.  First, I'll summarize:

Issue 1: Should we or should we not go to a larger CF flash size in
Bobcat ASAP?

And if so, what size and what type?  Realistic size
choices: 1GB - 4GB.  Type: regular CF or microdrive.

One of the top things that CS is asking engineering for these days is
a bullet proof and simpler upgrade process.  Not enough space on the
flash drive has been fingered as being a leading but not sole cause of
failing upgrades.

Issue 2: Are we abusing the flash or just being creative about
new/different ways to utilize it effectively in our system?

Historically, HW was of the belief the CF would be used only for a
very light writing usage footprint.  Possibly around the cheetah design
time frame.  In reality, we use it as a general purpose filesystem which
we write to quite often.  Not to mention that we use 20MB of it for
swap space!  CF cards in many Bobcats and Cheetahs in the field have
surpassed their maximum writes, although only a few have failed so far.
So, it's possible that we have a problem looming where a lot of these
CF cards will start to fail at some point, which would really piss off
our customers.  Switching to a microdrive would alleviate this issue,
as well as greatly improve the performance nuisance that writing to CF
presents.  We would have to upgrade all our systems in the field after
a period of testing.  This might be the smart play because we could be
just this side of a lot of customer systems croaking because their CF
stopped working.  So, in essence, we could kill several birds with one
stone: switch to micro drive, and upgrade all the units in the field,
to alleviate performance and pending field issues; switch to 1GB or 2GB
to get out ahead of our approaching issue of being out of space.

Talking points:

If we discover that we really need a larger flash drive than .5GB to
deploy a Linux-based release, the time to switch to a larger flash in
Bobcat systems is now, in order to minimize the number of systems in
the field we have to send a replacement flash drive.

I believe it is naive to think that we won't need a larger flash drive
for our current OpenBSD based releases starting with Delorean(2.3) or
even Lambo(2.2).  The reason I think that is I'm told we are teetering
on the brink right now for some configurations, and it's a safe bet
that the disk usage of the web-ui and cluster database will grow in the
near term as new code is written to fix bugs and flesh out features.
It's simply the natural order of software evolution.  Also, it is
already an issue for developers because debug builds with everything on
it are too big for 512MB flash, so developers are deleting the web-ui
files in order to make things fit.  That is at best a very short term
solution.


The issue of cost has been raised, especially in regards to switching
to a micro drive.  I would like to point out that there are cost points
in several directions.  How much will it cost to replace every CF card
in every customer machine every couple of years vs. using micro drives
now[-ish]?  How much does it irritate us and our customers that some
operations are really too slow because they are limited by the write
speed of a solid state CF card?  OK, that last one may not be easily
measureable in dollars, but you get the idea.

Current consumer market prices for solid state CF (not necessarily
representative of the cost of CF or microdrive cards appropriate for
Onstor filers):

$142.98   8GB
$ 64.97   4GB
$ 36.50   2GB
$ 22.95   1GB
$ 14.17  .5GB

Microdrive:
$134.00   8GB
$120.00   6GB
$ 67.00   5GB
$ 60.00   4GB
$ 40.00   2GB USB microdrive ??

Should we casually mention any of this to CS?

Cheers,

a
