On The Margins

Friday August 03, 2007

[ Sun Microsystems Inc. ] Cooler than this?

MPK (Menlo Park) ... First Friday of August ... What can be cooler than taking a walk around the internal block of the Solaris building? I never knew where offices of all the people I was meeting in meetings were ... I still don't but did meet some as I walked "around the block" ... Friday ... buzzing with buzz of machines, conversation, plans and celebrations! ... What can be cooler in a hot August day?

2007-08-03 10:35:30.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Tuesday July 10, 2007

[ Technology ] Database Price-Performance on Sun All Open-Source Platform

More good PostgreSQL and open-source news! 

In the first week of July 2007, Sun announced a very attractive SpecJ2004 result for an all open-source Sun stack, including PostgreSQL on Solaris on Niagara.

Josh Berkus and Jignesh Shah have already written about the recent SpecJ benchmark results. 

The highlights are already given by Josh and Jignesh's blogs: Josh notes the importance of the results in proving the suitability of the Niagara architecture for DB applications and the importance of this result as a proof of SMP scalability. He also notes the significant price difference between Sun and the competition and looks forward to even better SMP performance by PostgreSQL database on Solaris. Jignesh gives some details regarding the DB tuning strategy used. If you want more of the tuning strategy details, you should probably leave him a comment.

Here's a summary of other highlights based on other sources:

• This is the second all open source SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark result and Sun is the only vendor to publish all open source results.
• It demonstrates Sun's commitment to use open source software at all levels of the stack -- including open source databases -- and to bring these price/performance benefits to users.
• An all-Sun, all open source stack comprised of PostgreSQL on Solaris (built off OpenSolaris) on T2000s (with OpenSPARC) with Glassfish gave 89% the performance at 34% the cost of a comparable HP benchmark with proprietary database, application server, and hardware. (Tom Daly provides further details regarding price-performance results.)
  

If you do not know about SpecJ 2004, refer to spec.org. In summary, SPECjAppServer2004 heavily exercises all parts of the underlying infrastructure that make up the application environment, including hardware, JVM software, database software, JDBC drivers, and the system network. The primary metric of the SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark is jAppServer Operations Per Second ("SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS") in either @Standard or @Distributed mode.

Look, also, at Tom Daly's blog for more information on these performance benchmarks and more.

Disclosure Statement:
Sun Fire X4200 (6 chips, 12 cores) 778.14 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard.
HP rx2660 (2 chips, 4 cores) 874.61 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard.
SPEC, SPECjAppServer reg tm of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation.
Results from www.spec.org as of 7/10/07.

2007-07-10 00:12:06.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Sunday June 10, 2007

[ Technology ] PostgreSQL and Ruby Rock in the East

Read Jim Grisanzio's blog to see how PostgreSQL and Ruby rock in the East! ... There, you'll find pictures of Josh Berkus' PostgreSQL presentation, which may motivate you to learn more about the special features Solaris brings to its PostgreSQL distribution, and you may look, even further, into the new version of SXDE that's coming out with PostgreSQL 8.2.4 ... DTrace, Kerberos 5 and SMF enabled! ... For more on DTrace and PosgreSQL, see Robert Lor's weblog.

2007-06-10 22:36:41.0 -- Comments [2] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Saturday March 03, 2007

[ Technology ] Open Solaris Starter Kit

Simon Phipps writes about Open Solaris Starter Kit.

2007-03-03 13:18:32.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Saturday February 03, 2007

[ Technology ] Ubuntu Laptop

Last year Ubuntu made some moves. This year, the Linux I run on my multi-OS Toshiba Tecra M5 laptop is Ubuntu. My first reaction to Ubuntu on the laptop was that it reminded my of my Mac OS-X machine at home. My second reaction was "let me try this some more" but how surprising can that be? Both have their foundation on Unix and its basic concepts, i.e. the bedrock of of operating systems such as Solaris.

2007-02-03 00:19:10.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Monday January 22, 2007

[ Art (هنر) ] Solaris Deskop + Sun-Intel

I don't know what the default Solaris ("Nevada," Solaris 11, build 55+) desktop is made of but whatever it is made of, it looks and works great. I've only begun exploring it, and it is proving very sticky, meaning that once you start working on it, it is hard to let go. In terms of look-and-feel and real-time user-level performance (not to mention other measures), it competes extraordinarily well with the very best Linux desktops I've ever used, including the ones I'm using now. In my environment, i.e. a 2003 two-CPU Gateway desktop located in building 17 of MPK, it is blazingly fast, and it is not even the latest Xeon. Little wonder: Check out the Sun-Intel announcement coming soon here. The WSJ report on the deal, based on analysts' predictions, can be found here. Sun's CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, has just posted about the announcement.

2007-01-22 10:05:19.0 -- Comments [4] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Friday January 19, 2007

[ Technology ] Solaris on a 2-CPU x86 Machine

I have this very fast development Gateway desktop with Intel CPUs from three years ago.

For some time I have wanted to upgrade the system with a solid operating system. So, as I write this, Solaris "Nevada" is being downloaded and installed from the network. (Thanks go to James Liu, a fellow blogger on blogs.sun.com who provided me with the installation CDs!)

... Now, the installation is complete and it rocks ...

It gives me a root account and I can easily create user accounts, and the desktop is truly attractive ...

2007-01-19 12:21:45.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Tuesday January 09, 2007

[ Work ] Partitioning a Disk

Warning: This entry is the story of partitioning a disk.

I've recently moved offices within Sun and just got a new laptop. With a back-up work system, I figured it was a perfect time to go back to the Gateway desktop I've had in my office for some time and try to install Solaris on it.

As would be expected, we have weekly builds of Solaris here, and right across from my office, I can pick up the latest weekly build on a DVD. This seemed like a good place to start.

As a first step, I wondered if I should partition the hard disk on my Gateway machine which currently runs Windows. I didn't really need the Windows operating system any more. I don't use it for any application that would require it and all applications I run are either Java-based or available on Solaris, and I have used Open Office very successfully since 2003 to deal with MS Office based documents.

Nevertheless, I decided that the partitioning exercise was to be had not so much because I was interested in preserving my Windows files but because I wanted to see how easy it was to perform the task without paying for any software. James Liu had earlier mentioned QtParted tool available on Knoppix, which is a Linux OS possible to run from a CD. I had always wanted to use an open source partitioning facility, and this seemed like a good working choice. The alternative, of course, was just not to partition and install using the Solaris installation DVD.

When I was unable to produce my own working Knoppix CD, James kindly came to the rescue and gave me a working CD of Knoppix 5.1.1. James had burned this CD on Solaris. (The CD I had produced kept relegating me to a useless shell of Knoppix perhaps because I was producing it on a Windows XP system with a freeware CD image burner, probably not adequate for my purposes even at low burn speeds. There are commercial tools for burning CDs from CD images on Windows XP but I didn't want to use any of these.) 

The Knoppix OS on the CD works really well. I was now able to load the OS and then run QtParted to resize the existing partition and "create" new ones, and then run QtParted to "commit" these changes. I used suggestions from Richard Friedman which worked really well.

It turns out that the Ferrari laptop on which Richard installed Solaris Express has a similar size of disk to the Gateway machine in my office. The only difference is that QtParted performed the job of disk partitioning in less than 20 minutes on my Gateway machine which compares very well with the 2 hours in the Ferrari experience. As always, we shouldn't compare apples and oranges. The higher speed for partitioning has to do with the two CPUs and the large RAM available on the Gateway box in my office.

More later ...

2007-01-09 18:31:26.0 -- Comments [2] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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