Material, Social and Spiritual Capital

The dean of my MBA school wrote an interesting article about Material, Social and Spiritual Capital.  I need to sit with it before commenting, but it touched me, and maybe there will be another blog about it in a couple days...

NPIV and Solaris FibreChannel

What do I do all day at the office? Lately, I've been working on adding NPort ID Virtualization (NPIV) to our Leadville FibreChannel stack.

At a high level, you can think of NPIV as allowing one physical FibreChannel HBA to log in multiple times to the SAN, and so you have many virtual HBAs.

Why is this interesting?

The first thing I thought of when I heard about this is hypervisor applications, like Xen. If you have one world wide name per DOMU (in Xen terminology), you can do the same zoning/lun masking that you've always done per server, but this times it's per DOMU.

Another use is that if your HBA breaks, and you have to replace it, you can use the old WWN on the new HBA, and you won't have to rezone your SAN.

Storage Magazine has some more good background reading here on other possible uses.

I'm looking at how this will work in the existing Solaris FibreChannel stack, and Solaris Xen implementation (although it's not dependent on Xen).

Watch this space for more details in the future.

Sun Developer Network and Storage

My department wants to explain why Solaris is a good platform for doing storage development. We'll be regularly publishing articles on Sun Developer Network. The first covers why you'd want to use the FibreChannel drivers built into Solaris, the second talks about some of the many storage standards that Solaris implements. I worked on the first one with my colleague Reed Liu (who I was just reminded is actually Dr. Reed Liu, although he is so down to earth I forget), and wrote the second with help from many colleagues.

Pictures from Peking University

I attend an MBA program at Peking University.  I got to campus early on Sunday morning, and snapped some pictures.

Fireworks

Ten years ago, I used to take a lot of pictures, with a big 35mm SLR camera.  Had a darkroom.  It took a lot of time, and I put it aside eventually.

Yesterday, I took some pictures at Chinese New Year I really enjoyed, the felt similar satisfaction I used to get with the SLR. But, this is with a simple Canon Digital point and shoot and picasa.

Chinese New Year's Party

A couple weeks ago, Sun ERI had its New Year's party. For weeks before the office was buzzing with people practicing.  Sin Yaw's blog has a cool video.  There were some amazing performances, singing, performing plays, playing instruments. I was even in a show with other laowai (foreigners).  If you look closely, I'm the forth foreigner, in red, joining the other three.

Several of  the foreigners in my office commented that this would never happen in America. I think it's true.

Solaris FibreChannel Stack

On opensolaris-storage, there have been some discussions about the Solaris FibreChannel stack. Here's a pretty good picture of how it fits together.  From the top:

1. Fibre Channel HBA-API and Multi Path API are industry standard ways to communicate with storage software. luxadm and cfgadm are utilities to control and report status on storage.
2. sd/st/ses are SCSI target drivers.  Target drivers in Solaris are a driver to control a particular type of SCSI peripheral. We'll talk about IP/ARP and the other networking portions later.
   
3. SCSA is thin layer that connects HBAs and target drivers
4. MPXIO is the Solaris multipathing solution. It allows for several physical paths to one device, for fault tolerance and higher performance.
5. FCP is the SCSI to FibreChannel layer. FCSM is a small device driver for management applications. FCIP is network device driver, which allows IP over FibreChannel
   
6. FC Transport is the fctl and fp device drivers.  This keeps track of which ports are where. It also generally does the FP-2 protocol, handling device discovery and changes in the SAN.
   
7. At the bottom, we have each vendor's specific library, to run their particular HBA.
8. On the right is FibreChannel doing networking.  FibreChannel was designed as a general purpose transport. As well as SCSI, it can carry TCP/IP networking protocol, and Solaris supports IP over FibreChannel.
   
9. On the bottom left are the FibreChannel drivers that run without the Solaris FibreChannel stack.
   

Money

In Beijing, I usually pay with cash. Credit cards aren't widely used, although a lot of nicer restaurants, department stores and grocery stores accept them.  I recently got a local Chinese debit card that can be used in places that a Mastercard or Visa can not.

When you pay with cash, in particular the larger bills like 50 or 100 RMB (=6/12 USD), people either look closely at the bill, or run it through a machine to check that it is authentic. I never really thought much about it, but then last week, I went to a restaurant with my colleagues and paid the bill with a 50 RMB note. The waitress returned a bit later, and said sorry, this isn't real. Then we all sat around and tried to figure out why it wasn't real (it was difficult).

For this bill, there were two problems. The first was that the silver strip woven vertically into the note was actually printed on. This goes through the 0 of the large 50. The second was that if you crinkled the note, it made more noise than a real note. 

Biking in Beijing

One of my New Year's resolution was to get in better shape this year (the other is to really work on my Chinese). Not being one to go to the gym, I decided to ride my bike to work regularly. It's 7km, more or less, from my apartment, at north third ring road to my office near Tsinghua University.

I have a bike (it's actually my third bike in Beijing, the other two were "lost" as they say here).  It's a one speed, perfect for Beijing's flat terrain, utilitarian with a basket on the front, a rack on the back.  It cost 350 RMB (about 45 USD); a little high but the bike salesman said something about it being specially built for foreigners, and it was indeed a little bigger than others.

So, I ride. At first, when I started riding to work, I was annoyed at all the traffic.  Taxis don't respect bikes, unless they're going to hit you (someone told me if a taxi driver hits you, he will be fined an incredible amount of money).  There is always traffic, and cars drive in the bike lane. Pedestrians often walk in the bike lane because the sidewalk is non existant.

Eventually though, it became more of a game. See how fast I can go, and not use the brakes. Pass the electric bike. Go around the buses that stop in front of you to pick up passengers.

And so it's become fun.  Beijing is actually a pretty good place to ride. It's the only place I know where the big ring roads circling the city have bike lanes. Although there are a lot of cars that don't seem to pay attention to bikes, I don't think I've ever seen an accident.  And, generally it's the fastest way for me to get from home to my office (faster than waiting in a taxi in a traffic jam).

Network Storage releases to OpenSolaris!

I am back from a trip to Japan for Chinese New Year Holiday, and noticed that the software I've worked on is now part of OpenSolaris. Check it out: Open Solaris Storage Community

I worked with many others at Sun to make this happen. For all of you that have been waiting, enjoy!

If you don't work at Sun, it may be confusing why this software was released separately from the original OpenSolaris release. Source code at Sun is organized into consolidations, or collections of related software. Sometimes consolidations follow technical boundaries, sometimes business boundaries, and sometimes they're historical. ON (Operating system/Networking) is the largest consolidation, and is what was originally released with OpenSolaris. It contains the bulk of the Solaris kernel, and many device drivers. Network Storage Consolidation contains much of the storage software used in Solaris.

Moving to China

I've moved to Beijing for six months, to help the Sun team here pick up
some of the storage software that I've worked on in the past. The
opportunity arose when we decided to move some development work here.
After waiting a long time for different administrative approvals within
Sun, I finally made it here 8 days ago.

I live in a small apartment, not far from the Sun office. The Sun office looks
surprisingly like any Sun office, similar decorations. It's a little
quieter than Colorado, but you really could be in any Sun office.

My neighborhood is called Wudaokou. It's near several universities, so there
are lots of students, foreign as well as Chinese. There are a couple
restaurants for western students that could be in any college town in the
US, as well as lots of good Chinese restaurants. There's a fair amount of
high tech and some huge electronics stores. There's a subway stop nearby,
which is great for getting into the city center.

Different topic - a white paper (called blue print at Sun) I wrote with a
colleague at Sun was recently published. It talks about combining existing
functionality built into Solaris with the newly released iSCSI initiator
to achieve redundant connections. The story is still not simple, and will
probably get more complex before the industry settles on de facto
standards, but hopefully this paper will help. See www.sun.com/blueprints

Hello

My job at Sun is working on the FibreChannel device driver stack. FibreChannel is a protocol used to mostly used for relatively big computers to communicate with storage devices.It's a complex protocol, and has taken me a long time to appreciate it - to really appreciate it. We just released SAN foundation software 4.4.1

I may regret this offer, but we're wanting customer input, so if you're familiar with out software (Solaris SAN Foundation Software), and have something to say, please drop me an email (aaron.dailey at sun.com). We're especially looking for items that might make your job easier.

I've been at Sun nearly 4 years ... hired in the boom of the 2000, and still here. It's still one of the best places I've worked.Some of us talk about what we'd do if we didn't work here, and especially in the Colorado area, there's not much that compares to being able to work on the kernel of an operating system (in my mind).

I live in Boulder, just up Highway 36 from the Sun facility in Broomfield. If I can figure out how to put some links, I'll include some web cameras here . Boulder sits on the edge of the Rocky Mountains, and is quite a beautiful place to be. It's known for a lot of things - an island of liberalism in a conservative state, uber atheletes, and great natural beauty.