Wandering Thoughts archives

2019-06-27

Our last OmniOS fileserver is now out of production (and service)

On Twitter, I noted a milestone last evening:

This evening we took our last OmniOS fileserver out of production and powered it off (after a great deal of slow work; all told this took more than a year). They've had a good run, so thank you Illumos/OmniOS/OmniTI/etc for the generally quiet and reliable service.

We still haven't turned any of our iSCSI backends off (they're Linux, not OmniOS), but that will be next, probably Friday (the delay is just in case). Then we'll get around to recycling all of the hardware for some new use, whatever it will turn out to be.

When we blank out the OmniOS system disks as part of recycling the hardware, that really will be the end of the line for the whole second generation of our fileserver infrastructure and the last lingering traces of our long association with Sun will be gone, swallowed by time.

It's been pointed out to me by @oclsc that since we're still using ZFS (now ZFS on Linux), we still have a tie to Sun's lineage. It doesn't really feel the same, though; open source ZFS is sort of a lifeboat pushed out of Sun toward the end, not Sun(ish) itself.

(This is probably about as fast as I should have expected from having almost all of the OmniOS fileservers out of production at the end of May. Things always come up.)

Various people and groups at the department have been buying Sun machines and running Sun OSes (first SunOS and then Solaris) almost from the beginning of Sun. I don't know if we bought any Sun 1s, but I do know that some Sun 2s were, and Sun 3s and onward were for many years a big presence (eventually only as servers, although we did have some Sunrays). With OmniOS going out of service, that is the end of our use of that lineage of Unix.

(Of course Sun itself has been gone for some time, consumed by Oracle. But our use of its lineage lived on in OmniOS, since Illumos is more or less Solaris in open source form (and improved from when it was abandoned by its corporate parent).)

I have mixed feelings about OmniOS and I don't have much sentimentality about Solaris itself (it's complicated). But I still end up feeling that there is a weight of history that has shifted here in the department, at the end of a long slow process. Sun is woven through the history of the department's computing, and now all that remains of that is our use of ZFS.

(For all that I continue to think that ZFS is your realistic choice for an advanced filesystems, I also think that we probably wouldn't have wound up using it if we hadn't started with Solaris.)

OmniOSEndOfService written at 22:29:11; Add Comment

By day for June 2019: 3 26 27; before June; after June.

Page tools: See As Normal.
Search:
Login: Password:
Atom Syndication: Recent Pages, Recent Comments.

This dinky wiki is brought to you by the Insane Hackers Guild, Python sub-branch.