A number of ground-breaking innovations we from Sun had talked about over the last two years now have materialized over the last few weeks:
We have integrated ZFS into Solaris and therefore through OpenSolaris and Solaris Express (for now the Community Releases starting with build 27) you now may read the documentation and even the source code (well, the ultimate documentation), and you man not just read about it, you also can play with it. ZFS is not just a new filesystem - it takes a new approach to filesystems as it dissolves the the boundary between volume management and file systems. It moves from the traditional abstraction of a filesystem as a fixed structure within a virtual disk towards filesystems which offer just a namespace and dynamically allocate space from a storage pool. Jeff Bonwick, the chief architect for ZFS, had previously designed the kernel memory allocator for Solaris. Sometimes it is important to make a step back and rethink the whole problem not just optimize bits and pieces. E.g. in ZFS we did not optimize file system logging, but we got rid of the need for logging at all by ensuring that the on-disk state is always consitent by never rewriting data but using the copy-on-write paradigm and atomic state transitions instead. ZFS may be considered the last word in filesystems which being a 128-bit filesystem has enough capacity (more than a Zetabyte) to boil the ocean. It's not yet the final product version, e.g. we are still tweaking the performance - it is already great in many cases but will become even better until it will show up in the Solaris 10 product during the first half of 2006.
We have also launched our 2nd generation throughput computing processor codenamed Niagara and now officially termed UltraSPARC T1. This processor can process the highly parallel workloads found especially in the web-tier of datacenters, but also in other tiers, much more efficiently on it's up to eight simplified and less complex cores than traditionally designed processors. The internal utilization of a processor today is often only about 25% as it is stalled waiting for data from memory, the T1 typically has a much higher utilization as it keeps the processing units busy with its four threads per core - and Solaris as an operating system is able to efficiently handle these many threads and can schedule them to the 32 CPUs an UltraSPARC T1 provides - 8 cores each with 4 threads, and each of these shows up as a CPU in Solaris - obviously a real system-on-a-chip (based on its processing power it is an E10k on a chip!).
And we now also have launched the systems with these CPUs (actually we have already been
shipping them for a few weeks now): the Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 CoolThreads Servers. Today the cost of power consumption of a server calculated over three years is in the same order of magnitude like the cost of aquisition, it still is a factor of 3-4 smaller, but it is in the same order, and while the cost of hardware is declining energy costs are on the rise. And it's not just about cost, it is about eco-responsibility in general.
In the launch this week we used a demo called Sim Datacenter to clearly show the value of T1 based systems over our competitors. It is a very simple, easy to use tool to simulate a datacenter and see how the variables of cooling, power, space and performance are affected.
Customers liked it so much, they asked us to make it available, so here it is. Interested in more technical details ? Richard McDougall has collected a number of relevant blogs.
By the way: we just made a major step forward in our line of traditional UltraSPARC processsors with the introduction of UltraSPARC IV+. This is much larger step from the US-IV than the small "+" seems to imply. The naming only highlights its compatibility: it fits into the same systems as the US-IV. We moved from a 130nm to a 90nm design, we have a new core which introduces a third level cache, and we have slightly increased the frequency to 1.5GHz. All of this has increased this processor's single core performance by a factor of 1.5-2. We just announced a bunch of performance records archieved with this CPU.
I already had blogged about current
shifts in software licensing. All the innovation in Solaris 10 convinced Oracle to select the Solaris 10 Operating System as its preferred open source 64-bit development and deployment environment. They also have recognized the need for change in licensing. For licensing on the T1000 and T1000 servers there is a factor of .25 instead .75 applied per core.
But software business modells are about to change even more driven by the move to open source and free software. Sun is moving ahead of the pack by making the Java Enterprise System, developer tools and N1 software available at no cost. This especially lowers the barrier of entry for developers. Together with Solaris this environment forms the Solaris Enterprise System. And by adding the Postgres database to Solaris 10 it even offers a free relational DBMS.
But there is still a business model behind all of this. You man choose to take the free option, then you are on your own or may hope on free community support, but if you require warranty, and need to rely on support then we offer services for a fee.
Jonanthan Schwartz explains this very nicely (do you want his home phone number?).
And Open Source is not just about software. With OpenSPARC Sun open sources the implementation of the UltraSPARC T1. While open sourcing our innovations we continue to invest in research and development and thereby drive technology. In an
article in IEEE Micro earlier this year Marc Tremblay etc al. describe some details of what we are doing to further improve the next generations of throughput computing chips e.g. by bridging the widening gap between processor power and memory latency through scout threads that bring in data from memory into the cache hierarchy more effectively than todays approaches.
Innovation still matters these days.
