OpenSolaris


OSNews recently posted the following: Linux Foundation's Zemlin Declares Solaris All But Dead, which in turn links to the InfoWorld article: Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? Mr. Zemlin hammers on the fact that Solaris has only two redeeming qualities, ZFS and DTrace, which he degrades as "minor features". Both these technologies are revolutionary advances in computing and storage... "minor" my ass. "That's literally like noticing ...

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Its been a long week... here's a wrap up review. Sunday was the first OpenSolaris Storage Summit. There were two keynote presentations, I did the morning keynote on the topic of Cloud Computing (what it is, how it relates to storage, etc) and the afternoon (moved to be after mine actually) was Mike Shapiro talking about ZFS Hybrid storage and the new era of Solid State Drives (SSD). Assorted other talks included updates on various ...

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Seriously... I just can't take it anymore. Doesn't this: Remind you of this: Or, if you have less imagination or love for Adam West.... I'm just sayin'....

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OpenSolaris Town Hall Today

Posted on September 16, 2008

Today, the 16th, 3-5PM Pacific. Calling information is here: OpenSolaris Community Town Hall Meeting. I know its a hard time for west coast workers, but it should be worth your time if you can attend.

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The OpenSolaris COMSTAR project is one of the cornerstones of Sun's Open Storage initiative. Quite simply, it uniquely separates and abstracts back-end storage from the means by which you allow access to it. To be more specific, through COMSTAR's SMTF I can allocate some raw disk and then provide it to my SAN through an FC Target or iSCSI Target or SAS Target or you name it. Just think about this... you can now, with 100% open source ...

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Blastwave: Unofficial Update

Posted on August 9, 2008

I am in no way qualified to speak with regard to whats going on around Blastwave, but given that there are no official statements and lots of rumors and speculation I'll share some info. Please note that I consider both Phil Brown and Dennis Clark as friends and am completely impartial, at least for this post. If you've visited Blastwave.org recently you'll notice that parts of the site are "missing", you may also have noticed that ...

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In my previous post about the IP Provider I got the following comment: "There is nothing unpleasant about the wonderfulness that is tcpdump! You’ll need to put a lot of work in to match tcpdump’s usefulness with Dtrace…" That just sounds like a challenge. Bring it on! Can snoop or tcpdump do this? root@ultra ~$ ./ip_whosent.d Packet sent to 192.168.100.4: 88 byte packet on behalf of ssh (PID: 1075) Packet sent to 192.168...

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Explore Your Storage with FileBench

Posted on July 18, 2008

FileBench is one of the most powerful and flexible benchmarking tools around. Your typical tool like Bonnie++ or IOzone tend to take some discrete operation and do it multiple times at differing block sizes (8K file in 1K blocks, 8K file in 2K blocks, etc). These commonly used benchmarks are known as "micro-benchmarks". Using them tends to be controversial and can be confusing, leading to claims like "My new Seagate disk gets 800MB/s!!!" ...

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Thoughts on “Open Storage”

Posted on July 11, 2008

Some marketing terms come along that make you stop and think. Sun is pushing Open Storage, pairing up terms like "revolution", and you have to ask: Whats really new here? I suppose you have to step back and consider that all industries are not the same and what one customer considers "catching up with reality", another customer considers "a fresh new approach". When I think about what Sun concept of Open Storage really boils down to it ...

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Ode to Dads

Posted on June 16, 2008

There are a great number among us who have a job more important to us than tech... we're fathers and husbands. I've been privileged to know several of the great dads in the Sun/OpenSolaris ranks. Dr. Stephen Hahn, Jeff Bonwick, Bill Moore, Paul Armstrong (Google), and Chris Baker are all absolutely first rate fathers, aside from being brilliant technologists. I am immensely thankful for the opportunity to know not just these great men ...

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