There seems to be a lot of discussion about Solaris vs Linux as in this article about open source weblog this is quite relevant to the situation and decision that I have to make now. I need to choose what OS to use for the next 3yrs on my laptop and home computer. I will not change the type of Unix or Linux flavour every couple of months, that is a waste of my time.

Someone said that chosing which OS to run is so 1990's and not relevant nowadays. So why all the publicity and air time that this subject gets.

I want a computing platform that is reliable, has support, does not need daily weekly security bug fixes, I can understand and fix myself. This is from a domestic point of view and what I need to use commercially everyday for my work.

Corporates I assume do not care about the OS, until something goes wrong or they discover that the support costs start to become to high. Are all the Linux kernels really the same, I had as much of a change going from Red Hat to Mandrake to Suse as from HP-UX to Solaris. If you are a company running Mandrake or Suse, how easy is it really to go to Red Hat. Personally lots of things changed for me when I changed the Linux that I used. But I did it to learn about this new type of Unix. Now I have been through several Linux's what do I do next. To store pictures etc, ZFS which has the best data integrity and stops you from loosing data is what differentiates Sun Solaris, I cannot see anything new like this in Red Hat.

In the Unix area there is Solaris, Red Hat, Ubuntu, FreeBSD and Mac OS. There is also Windows, XP and Vista if you do not want to run Unix.

The battle is not Linux vs Unix but about four packages/operating systems as described above.

I just worked out why I am having trouble deciding what OS platform I want to go with for the next 3 yrs, after using Linux variants for the last 8 yrs, there is nothing new for the user. I feel that the Linux market has matured with one dominat supplier, Red Hat. With Ubuntu being the only new popular distribution on the market.

So Linux is in a mid life crisis, other distributions did not last this long, my old favourite Mandrake has gone. Suse, I just do not hear about. It is Red Hat this, Red Hat that, all the time. When I ask people what are they using they say Linux, so I ask them, so you make your own and they do not know what that means, 99% of the time people answer Red Hat. Does IBM put together a nice Linux distribution no, they resell others. Does HP create theie own distribution, no they resell others. OK nor does Sun, but I am writing this on a old Sun created distribution of Linux. So the only real creatives in the Linux world are Red Hat and Ubuntu, Red Hat is dominant, smoothering the rest. So Linux is Red Hat in reality.

We should report the Linux market by distribution not by the total, there does not seem much left. Red Hat, Ubuntu or nothing.

This is not too dissimilar in the UNIX server market where it is Solaris, AIX or HP-UX.

Is there some natural law where the industry or market place can only sustain 3 versions of a platform.

In the database market it seems to be Oracle, DB2 and MySQL.

I have a 3yr OS upgrade cycle on my PC, and have been running Sun's Java Desktop System 3 for 3 yrs now. My options are Red Hat, Apple, Ubuntu or I may try Solaris Developer edition, well that will be something new.

Are we searching for eternal youth by trying something new ?

As discussed earlier I am in a quandry about what I should move my laptop to next, when I first started using (Linux) Red Hat around 1999, I did get a wow factor, it was more stable than Win 98, it was faster than Win 98. Linux improved my productivity. Now Win XP is as good as Red Hat, Suse and Madrake seem to have waned a bit and are not as popular.

It just seems that Linux is either Red Hat or nothing, only Ubuntu seems to have any traction or wow factor.

It looks like Apple OS X, which is a Unix BSD variant is the latest wow platform. My wife is an apple fan and long term user so I have to use apple too. It did take me a while to hack into root on an apple, but when I figured all this out I could really fix things, like emptying the wastebasket from files that would not empty. Now and again we need a big hammer to fix things.

Actually it was StarOffice that made Red Hat usable, without an office suite Red Hat, Suse or Mandrake would have never made it onto my laptop. Probably StarOffice (OpenOffice) is what has made Linux successful on desktops/laptops. People say that Staroffice/Openoffice is terrible, however I moved to it to get more stability and I have not used Word any longer, I even do not know what MS office looks like.

Recently there were some articles that Linux will not be sucessful as it is free and big discussion on slashdot

Must be a topical issue, just when I am deciding what to run for the next 3 yrs. A decision not to be taken lightly as I have to spend time fixing my families computers.

I started using Linux as an early adopter back in 1999 when Win 98 just crashed all the time if I was using more than 3-4 windows. As a productivity tool Win98 was a inhibitor. Colleagues would boast about their patching methodologies for Win98, I kept thinking, why should I patch so often, don't they have anything better to do. So a Unix in the name of Linux was appearing for the the desktop and I gave it a try.

My first Linux system was on a Dell Cpi-A Lattitude Laptop, Pentium II 363MHz, 158MB RAM, 4900 rpm 6GB disk, that was with Red Hat.

About 2003 the Dell failed after 2 screens broke and I got a New laptop Toshiba Satellite 2450-S402, Pentium 4 2.5GHz, 512MB RAM,Nvidia GeForce4 420 graphics card, 7200 rpm 60GB disk.

Then I went through the following: Mandrake, Suse, Sun Linux Java Desktop.

Time has come to try something new as I have been running JDS for 3 yrs now.

When I first started it was all about open source, now no-one really makes their own Linux with "make" etc, everyone uses a specific distribution.

Should I use Ubuntu, how different is that, looks OK on my new home PC, but for some reason it reminds me of SUSE, it is the GUI or something.

I have learnt all I can, fixed Nvidia drivers, and Wifi. Power management is not that good on Linux but I do not want my laptop on standby, just in case it overheats in my bag and it starts a fire while I am travelling.

Does not seem like much new is happening in the Linux area, I have learnt all there that I wanted too, the innovations going in are really ports from other places, I understand linux is taking Dtrace and ZFS from Solaris.

What comes after desktop Unix/Linux or precisely, what comes after Red Hat. Looking for inspiration.

A long time ago, laptops were invented so that people could work while out of the office, this was meant to improve productivity. People would upload & download data/email via modems, then broadband or wired connections. Nowadays in the most progressive countries there is free Wifi everywhere. However, the portability of data has caused a problem, security or lack of security. I just read that a UK organisation as documented here http://www.silicon.com/publicsector/0,3800010403,39169759,00.htm has laptops for some of their employees, but will not let them remove these from office, similar problems are ocuring all over the world, military organisations are often losing or misplacing their laptops, data from disks is being lost.

So my logic is such, we have mobile devices which are not meant to be mobile, so why don't we have a more secure and cost effective work/IT model. Historically, organisations went from terminals (keyboard + screen) with no data, desktop (large PC) with distributed data, laptop/notebook with lots of data. Now, we have so much important data on these devices that they are becoming a liability. Due to, too much sensitive data being lost and therefore by implication, possibly could fall into the "wrong" hands or the data could be missused.

As always we have answers or options for these.

1) Encrypted data on all laptops
2) Thin desktop with no data or as we say, stateless devices.

As a Sun employee, we have solutions for both of these.

1) Encrypt data on disk and keep it's integrity, ZFS this is open source and many companies are adopting this outside of UNIX,
2) Companies gave people laptops on their desks, but as they are never allowed to remove them. They are the wrong device, you probably would feel better if the device has to remain at work with a big screen and a larger more ergonomic keyboard. Hence the SunRay.

So all the security people scratching their heads need look no further. Remember the SunRay can run Windows and Unix based applicaitons. Linux to me is Unix, so that includes Linux too.

Picture of the SunRay here: http://www.sun.com/sunray/sunray2

Now I did talk about this a while ago. "A ray or enlightenment in a dark IT quagmire", cost $249 for a Sunray, Suntan lotion not included. http://blogs.sun.com/ValdisFilks/entry/wyse_copies_sunray_idea

I honestly had nothing to do with the article http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/05/ibm_bluegene_web where IBM describes that they can host the whole internet on one "system". As you can guess I do not work for IBM, so I have no great interest in agreeing with them. But I did publish my commodity article way before The Register. However, as a IT person we cannot ignore that IBM does do some good things now and again. Especially when the competitors encourage them to improve. Well that is what market forces do when we do not have monopolies.

Some quotes from the article where IBM agrees with me, or I agree with IBM. You decide.

"So, you're working with systems in a sense very similar to the individual x86 boxes that make up most clusters. Although the unique packaging of the Blue Gene systems along with their low-power cores allows IBM to create a more reliable computer - by more than two orders of magnitude - than commodity boxes which fail all the time."

Now I have only been working in IT for 22 years and seen lots of trends, fashions and designs repeat themselves. A bit like the downsizing, upsizing, rightsizing and funsizing processes we go through. Now am I the only one with the opinion that commodity computers as used in clusters may not be the best solution, if I am then so does the writer of this article. Who said:

"You can't help but get the feeling that IBM and others are on the right track by exploring these hybrid models which place an emphasis on low-power chips and tight, SMP-like design where needed. Maybe we'll all look back at clusters and laugh in a few years."

Could this be the voice of experience.

But seriously, I do like clusters, laptops, PC's, large servers. There is correct place to use all of them and a wrong place. When trends become fashionable the IT business starts to use the latest fashion for the wrong purpose. Then after some spectacular failures we get sensible again. Technology corrections I call them, just like corrections in the financial marketplace.

Well as I work for Sun I can shamelessly plug the fact that if you want to have a systems that you can upgrade while they are running to very large sizes,such as 2TB of RAM 256 cores and 737GB/s memory bandwidth and 244GB/s I/O bandwidth. Then look no further here it is http://www.sun.com/servers/highend/m9000

You also do not have to do the cabling yourself to connect all the CPU's/commodity boxes, it is all done internally by the backplane. This way your datacenter will look less like a spaghetti factory.

Ok I say within 3 years time we will have even larger SMP systems where you could have a present day 4096 cpu cluster in 4 large SMP systems, well that is a statment that puts me in between a rock and a hardplace

Going back to the fact that IT should be exploited as a differentiator to give companies a competitive edge. This is the last of three blogs in my series that computers should not be treated like commodity potatoes.

So take this scenario, we get a load of cheap computers, they fail, someone needs to monitor the alerts, your customers have to have a degredation in service for a while, someone needs to unplug the cables from the failed commodity server, needs to order a new one (which with commodity servers will never be the same as the one replaced), then someone needs to cable it back correctly and install the software. Hopefully install the s/w automatically and hope that the drivers work the same way as the old failed cheap system, as you are using commodity computers the replacement will probably be different than the one replaced. To get to commodity equipment the manufacturers use the cheapest components available at that time, changing the type of equipment used within the computer every month.

There is an environmentaly cost here too. Would it not be better for the earths resources to have one server that lasts 3 years rather than two servers that last 18 months each. You have to add the costs of disposal and the environment to using commodity computers. So after doing all this what have we saved. If the commodity devices are on site in stock waiting to be used then we are wasting money on unused assets and stock, plus the cost of storage, and inventory control.

Think of all the transport costs you are creating in the excess transport of all the commodity equipment that you needlessly replace and move around. Bad CO2 creation, bad CO2, just like bad carbs. Any company that uses commodity IT needs to think about the knock on affects of using disposable commodity computer, if they want to be a responsible organisation. A computer is not just for christmas.

Should we charge companies for the disposal of computers, should companies who like to say that they are environmentaly friendly in their annual reports stop using disposable/commodity equipment. Rather, companies should say and work to a sustainable IT policy, where they are not using lots of commodity items with short lifespans. But use better quality computers with upgrade paths and longer lifespans.

Have we just done some fancy financing and hidden the IT mainteance costs for commodity computers in the christmas party fund. Next time there is no sheery and mince pies at the christmas party, remember the food budget went to pay for commodity computers and you are now eating the cheapest food and drinking the cheapest sherry. Surely not, not in todays sophisticated economy.

As a continuation on my blog concerning good enough systems and IT as a commodity, many people are buying IT, be it software, hardware or services from whoever can supply the cheapest price. Boy is this scary.

I understand that everyone wants a bargain but as my mother used to say, pay less costs more. I will never admit that she was right.

I just bought some new fuses for my house, technically Minature Circuit Breakers (MCB), Residual Circuit Breakers (RCD) or RCCD's for the fuse box. I bought from reputable European suppliers as my families life can depend on the ability of one of these to detect a short circuit (residual current to be accurate) and quickly turn off the current. Cheaper ones may not "trip" or switch off fast enough or the mechanism may stick after a while. You can look up all the specs, B, C class etc if you do not believe me.

In the same way I will not buy the cheapest food for my family as this could easily cause short term sickness and a deterioration in long term health. I also will not buy the cheapest wine, even though you get blue teeth free when you drink Lambrusco. I can save a fortune eating the cheapest frozen pizzas, but will this have any positive benefits. Or will a population that ate the cheapest low cost food be a burden on society and future generations.

Will a company in the same way that has fed itself on the cheapest IT, suffer from malaise, unresponsiveness and general bad management because of lowest price infrastructure. Will it take a couple years to show the deterioration in services and extra costs of buying decisions where the cheapest low cost IT was the main criterior.

So why do companies buy the cheapest computers. Why don't we employ the cheapest staff, get the cheapest coffee, have the cheapest food in the company restaurant. We used to call this a false economy.

Computers are now an intrinsic part of societies infrastructure, if we want society and commerce to run smoothly we have to invest wisely.

Who wrote this " A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing".

I was talking to an old colleague about what he sees going on in the industry and what some customers are asking. His answer was that a lot of people just want good enough systems, they do not request the best suited systems or what gives them any competitive advantage. Pretty sad as the IT industry always strived and tried to be innovative and make the best reliable and scaleable systems. Have we forgotten about this, is mediocracy the mantra of the day. Good enough systems are not only sad, but they cost companies and society time and money, you can always get more money, but once time is lost you cannot get it back.

Today I read that a countries online tax system crashed as it could not copy with the load at the end of year deadline for tax returns. So everyone has to spend their time doing their tax return again, to what cost to society and the economy. Was this calculated when good enough systems were specified. I hope this was not a good enough system, but some other problem. We do not need expensive technologies to fix this. The multicore CMT systems like the T5220 Niagara multi-core processors as a web tier and scaleable M-series enterprise servers as backend database engines can be used to avoid these problems. They can replace and be used to consolidate masses of good enough systems, that are not really good enough as we just saw. T5220 and M-series are good enough for every day use and can scale quickly to cope with peaks. We have the tools to avoid these embarassing IT problems lets use better systems.

If we put good enough brakes on our cars will they stop us in time when the car is full. To me that is not good enough. I want safety the system that meets the everyday and highest emergency requirements placed on them.

Good enough is not sufficent. We have the ability to do better, otherwise we have a serious malaise in society. How many of us will send our kids to good enough schools, if we had the choice and means to do otherwise.

If you only have the time to find good enough systems, I will save you time to find better ones. Here is a link to some better systems:

Consolidate several good enough small systems into this and save money and power. http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/t5120

Consolidate many medium good enough systems to this and get more performance and reliability. http://www.sun.com/servers/highend/m8000

Who wrote this; "Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognises genius."

Well the reason I started blogging was to stop having to answer the same questions over and over again. I set myself a target of blogging or writing a blog every week. But I must be honest and admit that I failed. Towards the end of the year I started to miss whole weeks. However, I did get a large number of blogs 400-500 hits per day on some of the most popular ones. Also, some very good comments and discussions.

So for this year I will continue and try to see if I can reach my target of blogging once per week. As one of the blog advisors at Sun said that the more you blog the more people will read your blogs.

So a Happy New Year to all those that read my blog. As this is my first day back at work my blog counting starts today, so it is my first week and first blog.

Stockholm is foggy, +2 deg C and all the snow has melted.

On 6th Nov I wrote an article in this blog that to do virtualisation sucessfully, i use the term sucessfully as anyone can do virtualisation badly. Administrators, storage and system admins need to understand their applications before consolidating applications and servers. Historical capacity planning analysis is the only way to be able to size a new virtualisation server correctly. Well today this article appears http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3714351 which explains that there may not be sufficient network or I/O ports (HBA's for those in the business) on a server to cope with the capacity required by all of the virtualised servers and applications. From a storage perspective that the article refers to, it looks like people doing virtualisation have not understood the I/O profile and access patterns of the servers and applications that they are virtualising.

So everyone two choices, virtualise and hope for the best, hopefully no-one will complain as it is fashionable, a bit like the tight trousers analogy in my 6th Nov blog. The story about the emperors new clothes springs to mind. Or get out your historic capacity planning reports to see if all the applications and servers will fit together.

The process going on here is a bit like packing the car boot before going on holiday, some people fill the whole boot up with "just in case" things they may need. Others take the minimum. Some of the people that fill their cars up to the maximum never get to their destination as their suspension breaks when they hit the first bump in the road, they end up with a broken car at the side of the road. Yup they even have the roof rack filled to the brim. Overutilisation as we say. It is a comfort thing taking your house with you on holiday.

I am glad this article appeared now that the virtualisation fashion may start to calm down and people start to become more sensible. After all, it is not the first time in the IT industry that consolidating servers is a new thing, nor is server virtualisation. Maybe we are in search of something new, only to discover something old. Well for new stuff read about the coolthreads servers and X4500, in 20yrs I have never seen anyone make servers and chips that use less power and do more.

I had a interview with a journalist last week about automated tiered storage, here is the transcript. Interesting questions that he asked, which makes me think how people think about tiered storage.

Q: For what is automated tiered storage good?

A: Even there are many problems that can be solved by automated tiered storage. There are three main areas where tiered storage is good, saving money or running costs, reducing the storage management workload and legal reasons. Briefly, from a power, cooling and reliability perspective it is not economical to store archive or long term data on one tier, primary storage such as disk. So by moving inactive data from disk to lower cost tier/media you can save money. To reduce the storage management workload, by implementing tiered storage you start to manage your data more efficiently. If you can have your data stored on the appropriate cost and performance storage you will not run out of space as often as if you just have all data on one tier. From a legal perspective you also may need to store data for very long periods of time. In the case of legal or medical records you just cannot keep it on spinning disk as this requires power all the time, also the lifespan of a disk is about 5yrs, CD/DVD is about 10yrs and tape about 15yrs. So you can imagine that if you only have one tier such as disk and you have a large amount of data your staff will be doing nothing productive, but just migrating data and replacing disks, CD's or DVD's. Migrating and replacing disks is not a business that a company wants to get into as it does not generate any revenue, just costs money. To summarise if you have automated tiered storage your staff can spend more time on much more positive and revenue positive projects. You still have to migrate your data from old to new disks, replace them, but it may not be such a difficult task.

Q: For whom is it a good approach?

A: There is no such thing as a normal or standard computer environment, company or business model, so it is a difficult question. But really it is good for people or organisations that want to save money or have large amounts of data or cannot control their data. So it is good for established businesses such as Banks and it is also very appropriate for the new Internet companies which have lots of data that they have to keep but becomes inactive, that is data that they may need to read one day but they cannot delete it. For many companies nowadays data is the "lifeblood" of the company, the actual data has value. For example if new data mining techniques become available in the future companies may want to keep old marketing data or customer transaction history and run it through various data warehouses. So it is good for whoever wants to extract the maximum value from their data. You never know the value of something until you do not have it.

Q: For whom is it not?

A: In reality no-one. I would say that it is not good for people who have lots of money and do not understand computer systems, possibly home, small and medium business, but if they want to save costs and reduce complexity, then it is good. So many people at home copy old photos to CD or DVD. Even though that is not automated, people are still using a tiered storage approach. Home and SMB users often buy lower cost and slower data storage devices to attach to their PC's. They then move old data such as photos to these devices.

Q: What should companies consider before starting an tiered (automated) storage project? (How to get the most out of tiered storage)

A: Companies should understand their data and how it relates to their applications. They should consider that some data increases in value over time such as medical data, legal and insurance data. Other types of data decrease with time, temporary files & SMS have lifespans of minutes and outputs of test program runs you may keep for hours or days until you get the correct result or report. Sun has a very simple questionaire that all companies can use to see how mature they are in managing their data compared to others, this is called the Information Maturity Model. This has all been documented here: http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/optimization_report.pdf

Q: What are some of the pitfalls?

A: The greatest pitfall is when you do not understand who uses the data and how. Then just move it to another tier. This is what we call the access pattern, there is not point in moving data from primary storage e.g. disk to secondary storage e.g tape every night and then every morning people want to use it. You are just wasting computing resources moving the data between tiers. It is what we call thrashing. Not understanding your data usage and access patterns is the greatest pitfall.

Q: Is automated tiered storage The Future? Or are there other technologies/approaches that might be better?

A: Automated and tiered storage has been available for at least 20yrs, it was called HSM in the early days, we had solid state disk, spinning disk and tape then. However, automated tiered storage often tracks and goes up and down with economic cycles. This includes the recent increase or peak interest in eco-computing. Where eco means economic and ecological, these factors go hand in hand and are strongly interrelated. So while we are concerned with power and cooling and general eco-computing it remains important. If a new storage medium becomes available then the dynamics of the tiers and costs can change or stop the trend to automated tiered storage. However, as people will always be creating more data and there will always be different cost and performance characteristics of storage tiers, devices and media I believe that automated tiered storage is the future. Another approach that may be better is to delete the data you do not need, how many people or organisations do this ?

Thanks for now.

A statistician drowned while walking across the river, the average depth of the river was 2ft (60cm).

This is the best way to explain that, if we use averages when planning for server virtualisation or storage consolidation we may have performance and or capacity problems.

I am a very large user of the web, to read news, to buy things, to research subjects, pay bills etc. However, last night after a 12 hour long work day and trying to balance a last minute business trip with family obligations I went web dead.

Could not buy a present online, web slowed down, could not think of what to do, shops were closed that late at night.

Next time someone asks me why you did not get the present for your wife, I will say I went Web dead, not brain dead. Always, good to blame the internet for your problems. We could not do that 10yrs ago, even though I tried with my Mosaic browser.

In order to do virtualisation properly and safely without affecting the response time of the system during peak loads. We must have historic performance data for systems we are virtualising. At least 18 months, to cater for seasonal usage patterns. If not we may not be able to meet the Service Level Agreements (SLA's) due to bad response time and in the worst case a system could crash if overloaded.

System crash is not the bad thing, it is the affect this has on the people who depend on the computer system that cannot do what they wanted to.

So for people doing virtualisation correctly, they will need to monitor, analyse trends and generally get better at capacity planning.

I expect a silent boom in IT capacity planning.