new blog

I'll be leaving Sun September 5.  I've set up a new blog at wordpress.

I'm also on the linkedin and facebook communities.

NPIV for Opensolaris is delivered

NPIV (N Port ID Virtualization) for Opensolaris is delivered. NPIV allows one FibreChannel physical port to support mulitple virtual ports, and is especially useful for virtualized environments, such as Xen.

We actually delivered the core kernel changes a couple builds ago. This allows you to create and delete NPIV ports using the new fcadm command.

But, what's really useful is combining that with code with just put back to support xVM to build 97.  With xVM, administrators will be able to associate virtual ports with a specific DOMU. Disk devices that are visible (via LUN Masking and switch zoning) on that port will appear in the DOMU.

You'll need 4Gb/S (or faster) QLogic or Emulex HBAs, and the latest firmware on your 4Gb/S or faster switches.  Targets (for example storage arrays) don't need to do anything special to support NPIV.

There's an except from the to be updated SAN configuration guide on the Opensolaris NPIV project page that explains how to use the new kernel functionality.

Virtual Box and Opensolaris Developer Preview

I just got Opensolaris Developer Preview working as a guest operating system under Windows using virtualbox.

 It's fairly painless, two things I had to do:

- Change the emulated NIC to Intel e1000g. It appear that the default emulated NIC, an AMD part, is not supported by the developer preview.

-Set up DNS. For some reason DNS doesn't work by default. It seems like this issue reported for Linux.

To solve it for Solaris, I modified /etc/resolv.conf, by inputting the DNS server  I found it from ifconfig /all in Windows. There may be a better way, but this works for now.

Performance is good - I haven't done any objective measurements, but it's very responsive.

NPIV Beta release

Our team released a beta of NPIV support for Solaris. See previous posts for what NPIV can do for you. This release contains the device driver changes and a utility to add and delete ports. Future releases will contain integration with xVM.

Solaris - it just works

I'm a programmer, yet these days, when I work with computers, I like to just get things done. This wasn't always true - when I was in my twenties, I loved tinkering with computers: software, sometimes even hardware. I played with some of the initial BSD and Linux kernels in the mid 90s,  tweaking driver source code for fun.  But, as I grew older, I became more interested in the task at hand.

So, it was with some procrastination that I approached getting my Ultra 20 equipped with a WiFi card.  I used to live in a small house, had the Ultra 20 on my kitchen table near the DSL. But I moved, and now I have the computer in one room, and the DSL line in another. I use a laptop most of the time, but there are times I just wanted the Ultra 20 to work.

 So I printed out the wifi compatibility list, and trudged down to HiLon, the local electronics market. I went to a bunch of vendors. I bought a Netgear WG311 version 3 card. Turns out I had to download and compile the driver, but directions were clear. Now, it just works.  I had a similar experience installing Solaris on my notebook, and old Toshiba Tecra M1 - it just worked, with the drivers on the Solaris install disks.

 I write this, because if someone working at Sun perceives a lack of compatible Solaris drivers, people outside of Sun must surely believe it's really difficult.  And, I think there was a time this was true, especially Solaris on x86.  But, the reality is, today's commodity hardware is largely supported by Solaris.  It just works.

Solaris SCSI Target

My colleagues across the aisle (and some across the ocean) released COMSTAR today. COMSTAR allows OpenSolaris to be a SCSI target.

Why is this interesting? Traditionally companies buy a dedicated RAID controller to store their data - something like this or this.  RAID controllers usually have special ASICS to compute the redundant data. The hardware boards are specially designed.  Their software is usually closed source, so it's impossible for end users to modify. The development environment varies a lot, sometimes it's a home grown operating system that's difficult to use, sometimes it's bought from different embedded OS vendors, but hard to modify.  Because the market for RAID controllers is relatively small and fragmented, the high fixed  R&D costs are not spread over much volume.

Enter COMSTAR. COMSTAR is the last link in being able to create a SCSI storage array using Solaris (actually you could do it before with iSCSI, but COMSTAR is flexible enough to support any transport).  With Solaris, you can do RAID in software doing ZFS.  CPU cycles are increasing due to multicore technology, especially relative to the speed of disks, so it's realistic to do RAID calculations in software, instead of costly dedicated ASICs.  You can attach nearly any kind of disk you want. You have a stable development environment. You can use commodity PC hardware.  You want to export some disks as NFS or CIFS, you can do that too.  And the code is free, along with a pretty good development environment.

Will we cause traditional RAID vendors to lose sales this week?  Probably not, because there are lots of things that dedicated RAID controllers can do that we still can not do. Today, there's no management story - you're left using Solaris system administration skills. The system level redundancy that high end RAID systems provide isn't there.

But for many people, COMSTAR and Solaris will provide a viable solution.  I see it as disruptive technology. Today, it fits the needs low end users. These users are comfortable administering Solaris, and assembling hardware. They understand and accept the limitations of the solutions.   But, with time, the additional requirements that higher end users require will slowly be filled by developers.

SNIC SDC NPIV video

This morning I posted slides that I gave at my talk, I just found that the video is up now. 

SNIA Developer Conference Report

Here's a link to the presentation I did at SNIA SDC about NPIV. The conference was well done; I reconnected with some old friends and heard some good talks.

The list of all talks is here. I didn't attend a lot of the talks because I had meetings at Sun's office in Menlo Park, but I did like "Storage on the Lunatic Fringe," about the next generation of storage devices. I also liked the ZFS presentation, explaining how new technology trends (fast CPUs with lots of cores) make ZFS attractive, even for doing RAID.  And, I enjoyed hearing Richard Stallman, because he's been such a big influence on the industry.


 

River Town

I just did the 12 hour flight to the US and finished Peter Hessler's River Town. The author was a Peace Corp Volunteer in Sichaun Province in the late 1990s, and it talks about his two years there.

I loved the book  - to put it another way, it's the book I would love to have written. Certainly Beijing is not Fuling, the small (200,000 person) town that Hessler found himself in, but the experience is similar.  It's about the experience of living in a foreign country. When I first arrived, my first memory is the taxi driving into Beijing too quickly, driving in the breakdown lane, swerving into the left lane and then the right. The next day I had to cross six lanes of this traffic to get to the office and I wasn't sure I would make it. I followed a Chinese person, and made it.

After days and weeks, the noise and chaos fades, and that becomes background, and you see depth of life. You see the complexity of how China's social network is interconnected, in some ways very caring, in some ways following fixed patterns. Hessler experiences the duality of being a foreigner: on one hand, I will always be waiguoren (literally translated, outsider, but the common way to translate foreigner), but on the other hand people trust you and are friendly because you're not Chinese.  How do you talk authentically about Chinese or American politics while respecting others' views? Hessler beautifully captures all the surprises of life, in a new country, in a new place.

I'd recommend it to my American expat friends in China, people who just want a good read, and even my Chinese colleagues who are curious about how a foreigner's life can be in China.

SNIA Developer Conference

I'll be at SNIA Storage Developer Conference next week (September 10-13) talking about NPIV and the work we're doing in Solaris. If you're there, come stop by.

A few words about me

 Who is Aaron Dailey?

Professionally, I've been an engineer nearly twenty years.  I graduated from University of Virginia computer science department. While I can't claim to have worked on a punch card machine, they did wheel out the last punch card machine out of the computer center my first year at UVA.

 Since then, I've worked in several different companies, mostly storage and/or Unix related, from IBM to Adaptec, to a startup called Chaparral (now part of Dot Hill), and now Sun. All were good in their own ways, although I do particularly enjoy Sun.

 In early 2006 I had an opportunity to come to China to do some training for several months. I jumped at the idea, and liked it enough that I decided to stay.  I spend time outside of work studying an MBA at Peking University.  I feel very fortunate to have met my wife here, a wonderful Chinese woman.


 

Foreigners

Last week I was in the US on a business trip, in Colorado more precisely. I had to go to Denver to run an errand, and passed a Chinese restaurant, in a blue collar neighborhood.  I was missing Chinese food, and I thought I might even practice some Chinese. So, I went in, talked to the owner, who seemed a little disoriented, perhaps hearing a white person speaking Chinese.

 But, the interesting thing was the customers.  A group of Hispanics sat in one corner.  An African American man, who I guess was from the Caribbean was ordering. And a couple of average looking white men sat in the booth beside me.

And it struck me, how this is one thing that's very different from my experience in China. In China, I am the foreigner, and it's obvious, because I look really different from 99.9% of the population. But in America, the concept of foreigner is very different - nearly all of us, or our ancestors were once foreigners. 

Art at the Office

Last week, I started seeing lots of sculptures put up in the small park outside Sun's offices. I took a look tonight, and was quite impressed, as were others I talked to. It's an exhibit by Chinese university students, from all over China.   I saw art I simply enjoyed, and touched me (and admittedly, some left me confused). And, I was surprised at the wide range of themes: some traditional Chinese cultural themes, but also many reflecting the huge changes that are happening in China now.

More NPIV Reading

I found a couple more links that I like about NPIV. The first is from IBM Journal of Research and Development. IBM did the initial development of NPIV several years ago. One reason I like this article is that it actually talks about the engineering trade offs they went through in developing NPIV. I've read a lot of specifications in my career, but it's rare to see the decisions behind the specification. Here's the link.

The second is from the team at Solution Technology. They provide a solid explanation of how it all works at the protocol layer. The link is here. 

Eating at Ikea

I just got back from a trip from Ikea.  Ikea is popular, lots of my colleagues shop there (in fact, I kept on recognizing furniture from my last apartment - I guess my landlord was a big fan).

One pleasant surprise is that it's also a good source for foreign (at least Swedish) food, and what they have is good quality and at reasonable prices. So, for good coffee, Swedish vodka, salmon, blueberry soup, cheese, crackerbread, or little Swdish cookies, it's the place to go.