Strongspace meet Thumpers, Thumpers meet Strongspace
October 30, 2006 - by jason
A year and a half ago (July of 2005) we launched Strongspace as a means to securely upload, store and share files in a closed system that is only accessible via encrypted channels.
It quickly became very popular as secure backup storage for a number of individuals, businesses, non-profit organizations and schools.
Then a year ago, we migrated it from FreeBSD+UFS systems to Solaris Nevada + ZFS and it become the first and largest ZFS file system publicly put into production outside of Sun Microsystems.
That was cool and quite a bit of fun. At the very least we got to know the ZFS team at Sun well, and Jeff Bonwick (architect of ZFS and now the CTO of storage of Sun) was even posting about things on the forum.
At the time the hardware was EMC Clariions that were fiber attached to Dell 2850s. This served us fine but it was a solution that was still keeping our per GB per month pricing higher than we would like. It was also a bit more complicated then I now like things to be: we needed to operate and maintain a separate fiber network, and each server needed fiber HBAs.
So over the last couple of weeks we’ve been transferring all the data over to containers that live on Sun x4500 nodes, and from our San Diego, CA facility to the one in Emeryville, CA.
Strongspace, like Bingo, is a perfect application for these servers because the processor and RAM needs are much less than the need for a lot of storage, and what we were able to do is get rid of any networking between “storage” and “servers” (they’re now one and the same). It’s also greatly simplifies things when you have the same operating system throughout and don’t have to involve other proprietary storage management tools.
One thing you’ll notice is that each Strongspace node will be significantly faster (especially when backing up from servers and services on our own network), and the web part of the application itself runs faster as a result of there being so many disc spindles in the mix as well.
I’m simply excited to have the pricing for Strongspace storage come down to Bingo levels per GiB and for us to be able to start bundling it along with hosting and other applications in Joyent Core
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