Taking DTrace to the Next Level
My relationship with DTrace has been a rocky and strange sort of round trip. Like most folks, when it first arrived I built up a stash of one-liners, generally to expand upon output from vmstat and the like, such as to show execname for each page out or something. With Brendan Gregg's DTrace Toolkit I found several fun well written script and used them where appropriate. But frankly, serious DTrace use seemed to me to be akin to mdb use... ...
ZFS Internals at CommunityOne in New York
Everything is confirmed. Sun has invited me to CommunityOne East in New York next week to present a one-hour version of the 30 minute ZFS In the Trenches talk I gave at the OpenSolaris Storage Summit. The session will be on 3/18 at 10:10 am - 11:00 am in breakout room 5. If you are using ZFS, live in or around New York and want more insight into ZFS please come on over. Secondly, this blog has been fairly slow lately.... here is ...
Watchmen Review
I'm a comic book fan... still read both Iron Man and Capt America actively. The following review is intended as contrast to the graphic novel and attempts to avoid spoilers. First and foremost, let me say that the movie was an amazing translation of the book to the big screen. Everything looks just the way it should, more or less, and I was amazed they captured it so well. There were some small changes, most notably the costume ...
ZFS in the Trenches: Presentation from OpenSolaris Storage Summit
And so ends another OpenSolaris Storage Summit. Turnout was great and despite the fact that it was strategically attached to the FAST conference, I was shocked how many people flew in from around the world specifically for this one day event. A big thanks to all who attended. I presented a lightening fast "ZFS in the Trenches" talk, which is guaranteed to be the most indepth ZFS talk you've ever heard in 30 minutes. When I gave the ...
LinkedIn Replaced The Resume; or 21st Century Relevance
I've embraced the reality more and more that LinkedIn has replaced the resume. This post on Slashdot convinced me that its worth saying publicly. For what its worth, I don't like LinkedIn. It limits the data that you can present thus causing a lot of what would be on a resume out. Such things include an inventory of skills, various extra work accomplishments, publications, and the like. Its a little too focused on job history and ...
Solaris Spit & Polish
An interesting discussion has been taking place on the OpenSolaris SysAdmin Community list, and I sense it will lead us toward some important changes in Solaris. Essentially it all comes down to the lack of spit and polish. What has always been something we perhaps ignored or downplayed has become far more starkly contrasted by truly easy to use yet complex things such as ZFS or SMF. The clearest examples are technologies that currently ...
Solaris Extended Accounting
Extended Accounting is one of the many under appreciated features in Solaris, and quite possibly the worst documented to boot. So, it's time to fix that. Accounting, in general, is a means of recording data about resource utilization, CPU in particular, with the intention to be used primarily for reporting and billing purposes. Conceptually it could be confused with Auditing (see I See You!: Solaris Auditing (BSM)), in that they both ...
Photo Archiving
I'm a storage guy and a father. Coming of age in the digital era means that I've never taken a picture on celluloid, I used my first bonus at MCI Systemhouse to buy my first real camera which was a floppy disk based Sony Mavica (which solved the early Linux/UNIX camera driver issue.) Now, here I sit with dozens or perhaps hundreds of gigabytes of memories. One of the great joys of being into storage is that on one hand I'm aware of the ...
Understanding ZFS: Transaction Groups & Disk Performance
I've been deeply concerned about the number of people who continue to use iostat as the means to universally judge IO as "good" or "bad". Before I explain why, lets review iostat. # iostat -xnM c0t1d0 1 extended device statistics r/s w/s Mr/s Mw/s wait actv wsvc_t asvc_t %w %b device 19.9 240.9 2.1 18.4 0.0 13.7 0.2 52.4 4 56 c0t1d0 127.2 0.0 14.7 0.0 0.0 ...
Death of a Hero: Robert Snively
Bob Snively is the storage giant you've probly never heard of. Employed at Sun for a number of years and recently moved to Brocade, if you dig into the SCSI and Fibre Channel standards you'll see his name again and again. His accomplishments are greater than I can list with any accuracy. Yesterday, in my SNIA presentation I mentioned "my personal hero, Bob Snively"... afterwards, 2 different people came up to inform me that he just ...