Upgrading Open Storage 7410

Adam blogged about a new software release for the Open Storage. Because I'm testing 7410 model I went thru an upgrade this morning. First I downloaded the new image and I was impressed - I got 9-10MB/s and it looks like the bottleneck was my 100Mbs link to an office network - I never got such download rates from Sun before, excellent!

Then with just one mouse click I uploaded the new image onto the 7410 and after a short while it was listed as ready to be installed. So I did click on it and after about 25 minutes later it finished. Of course during the upgrade I could still use the appliance.

I really like the end-user experience - couple of mouse-clicks and you're done. That's the way it should be.

I did some testing with filebench before and after the upgrade and I'm really happy to share that I'm getting about 33% performance improvement for varmail workload with the new build. While your mileage may vary I think Sun should have highlighted performance improvements in the Release Notes.

What would really be useful for testing purposes is an ability to create a pool without L2ARC or SLOG devices - this would make life a little bit easier with testing when comparing configurations with and without SSDs. The default behaviour is excellent as it will pick up SSDs and propose most optimal use of them so end-user doesn't have to even understand how it works and how to configure them properly. Still I would like to have an option to not configure L2ARC or SLOG without having to physically pull them out.