OpenSolaris
After 2 years of waiting, Project Crossbow has arrived! It integrated into Nevada Build 105 on Dec 4th, and BFU's became available around the middle of the month. SX:CE isn't available just yet, but should be up in about a week I hope. Crossbow is huge. This is a monumental improvement to Solaris and continues to push the bar out of reach of its competitors. Simply put, Crossbow redefines the nature of network virtualization. To ...
OpenSolaris 2008.11 is now fully and properly released. At opensolaris.com you'll find several video interviews, including Sun's all-star cast names like John Fowler, Tim Cramer, David Comey, and Dr. Stephen Hahn. There is a demo of Time Slider, Sun's time-machine like functionality added to GNOME's file browser which leverages ZFS snapshot navigation in an easy to use graphical way. There are also presentations with both Intel and AMD on ...
David Stewart, in a super-snazzy suit no less, at Tokyo Tech Days 2008, photo by Jim Gris. Is there a reason for this post? Nope... Intel Dave is just awesome. Anyone that can make me not hate Intel has got to have some kind of super powers.
The crew was so busy getting everything ready for OpenSolaris 2008.11 that they forgot to tell anyone they released it...... so, guess what: Download OpenSolaris 2008.11 Now! For a great run through of new features, especially from a desktop perspective, please watch Roman's excellent Whats New in OpenSolaris 2008.11 Screencast. I know the docs team spent a lot of time on the docs kit for OpenSolaris 2008.11, but I can't seem to find ...
I've been working on building better and better ZFS replication tools for use at Joyent, but it often gets complex and frustrating because, although replication in ZFS is very simplistic, managing all the snapshots, retentions, and mountains of error checking and handling, on top of reporting and stats collection, is a nightmare. So, just to relax I wrote a fun simple replication tool I call "Zynk". It's pathetically simple (read: ...
As with other features of ZFS, the traditionally complex is made simple and straight forward. This simplification can coax administrators into a false complacency. In ZFS, backup, archive, migration... any activity that fundamentally involves the movement of data from one system to another, is a replication activity. I propose that the traditional idea of weekly backups is, in fact, just really slow crappy replication. An HA Cluster ...
One of the most appealing features ZFS offers is built in compression capabilities. The tradeoffs are self evident, consume additional CPU but conserve disk space. If your running an OLTP database then compression probly isn't for you, however if you are doing bulk data archiving this could be a huge win. ZFS is built with the realization that in modern systems we typically have large amounts of memory and CPU available, and we should ...
ZFS is an amazing in its simplicity and beauty, however it is also deceivingly complex. The chance that you'll ever be forced to peer behind the veil is unlikely outside of the storage enthusiast ranks, but as it proliferates more questions will come up regarding its internals. We have been given a tool to assist us investigate the inner workings, zdb, but it is, somewhat intentionally I think, undocumented. Only two others that I know have ...
Some time ago I wrote a tool which I call arc_summary. It is a kstat based PERL application that runs some calculations and presents you with a pretty report of ZFS ARC. The idea is to help you interpret the data more appropriately. Lets look at some output: benr@quadra ~$ ./arc_summary.pl System Memory: Physical RAM: 4083 MB Free Memory : 130 MB LotsFree: 63 MB ZFS Tunables (/etc/system): ...
You'll recall my "unofficial" Blastwave update in August. The separation of Phil and Dennis seems to be solidifying a bit. The CSW Project (Phil and co.) are now up and running at OpenCSW.org. Minus the blastwave name and CSS, its more or less the same site and content you had/have at blastwave.org. OpenCSW.org includes a History page, which tells the CSW side of the breakup, minus the unverified assertions by Dennis Clarke that Phil ...