Sun BluePrints: Sun Reviewed Best Practices

We just ran into that problem with a blog presented by longtime Sun BluePrints author Mikael Lofstrand. We are forced to make decision to keep the offending permalink, or to break it.[Read More]

The modern datacenter is evolving into the cloud computing model, where networking, platform, storage, and software infrastructure are provisioned as services that can scale up or down on demand. This model allows the datacenter to be viewed as a collection of managed application services that are deployed automatically, while utilizing the underlying services. Providing sufficient elasticity and scalability for the rapidly evolving needs of the datacenter requires these collections of automatically-managed services to scale efficiently, and with essentially no limits. Sun calls this truly scalable approach a VeriScale architecture.[Read More]

This week we announce the next evolution of Sun's Open Network Systems solution architecture, get ready, it's a long one: "Sun Open Network Systems Enterprise 2.0 Solution for Oracle".[Read More]

The need to integrate Windows platforms and UNIX platforms is definitely not a new challenge for IT professionals.   More and more it is desired for Windows and UNIX platforms to share data in the same files on centralized storage systems.  There are many solutions available to make this possible from simple volume level solutions to complex single sign-on solutions.   All of these solutions are aimed to address the fact that Windows and UNIX platforms use different security structures for their user and group authentication to control access to files and directories.  With OpenSolaris we (Sun) took a very  intuitive  approach to address this challenge by building the CIFS stack directly into the OpenSolaris kernel.  With the CIFS stack built into the kernel, the new features of NFSv4, the new features ZFS and many other  OS enhancements the door was wide open to deliver a seamless, ubiquitous, cross-protocol file sharing system.[Read More]

This blog is about how to build a medium to large virtualization system
with all the great new technology that we have today. The discussion
points will take you from why virtualization, to defining some of the
components that I would use, and then putting them all together.

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As a follow up to the previous Sysbench benchmark that ran on Solaris UFS,we re-ran the benchmark on Red Hat Enterprise Linux release 5.2 using ext3 filesystem on the same setup and configuration with an additional change to the my.cnf configuration file.

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As a follow up to the previous Sysbench benchmark that ran on Solaris UFS (HTTP link pointer), we re-ran the benchmark using ZFS filesystem on the same setup and configuration.  Solaris ZFS does not allow the forcedirectio option as with UFS. We followed the “ZFS Best Practices Guide” recommendations. Namely, we limited the size of the Adaptive Replacement Cache (ARC) to 1GB, and we set the ZFS recordsize to 16K as it matches the Innodb page size. We used the same MySQL configuration file “my.cnf” that was used in the previous UFS test.

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Web2.0 data centers are typically filled with racks of x64 servers: single apps per box--an architectural convenience, but a decision that leads to inefficiencies of utilization, power, and space. Sun has been working this challenge with a unique and effective approach for several years: chip multithreading, or CMT. First introduced with our UltraSPARC CMT-based systems over three years ago, we have consistently demonstrated that architectures with multiple cores, each supporting multiple threads at the hardware level, can introduce significant efficiencies for some application environments. Web 2.0 turns out to be one such example.

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Today, Sun is launching an initiative centered around building awareness of MySQL on Sun systems.  Part of that announcement is a project called, in various forms, “the Web2Kit”, also known as “Olio.” When you peruse Sun's website, you will see reference to Sun Web2Kit, while if you go to Apache's site, you will see a similar kit named “Olio.”  Before getting into the nitty gritty details about how to set up Olio, I wanted to make clear how those two terms differ.

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Sun will soon introduce Solid State Drives (SSDs) to its lineup of systems. SSDs are bound to  change the dynamics of the IO subsystem. A traditional 15K rpm disk can do around 150 random IOs a second. However a single SSD should be able to do up to 30,000 random reads per second and consume a maximum of 3W, as rated by the manufacturer. In addition SSDs can provide faster access to the data (in the order of microseconds), while traditional hard disk drives (HDDs) have access time thousands time slower (in the order of milliseconds). [The test results in this blog were updated 2/23/09.]

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There has been much confusion over what power calculators are and I have run into differing opinions about what they should be or should do. Some expect power calculators to be datacenter planning tools, others expect them to be a guideline of how much power a system will consume.

Both are valid expectations, but when using a specific tool, no matter which vendor, it is of the utmost importance to understand what it provides: this should be specified by the vendor that publishes the calculator in order to disclose the intention of the calculator.

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In my many years of working with Sun equipment (I started off with an old Motorola-based Sun 2/50), each new generation of systems never ceases to impress with how much more functionality we can cram into ever smaller and smaller packages.  It's not just speed and performance (though that certainly is important) – it's things like domaining, fault management, and administration of system resources.

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Last time I talked about toys, and how Sun can—if properly guided—rock the world.  Let's talk about that a bit more, shall we?

I love philanthropism, volunteer for local charities, and would love to work globally on problems that face the world.  When not working on various pressing Sun projects or hanging out in fun
locales throu San Francisco, I really enjoy brainstorming on how
Technology can help “bridge the digital divide”.

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Observant visitors to the Sun BluePrints site might have noticed that we recently changed the banner from the "Sun BluePrints Wiki" to the "Sun BluePrints Community"!  Just where is the "community," you may ask?  It is all around us, consisting of thousands of readers who regularly visit the site. Now, what we really need is to get more conversations going: this is the essence of "community"!

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One size doesn't fit all today—at least when it comes to data access within the datacenter.  As much as we would like for this to be true, there are a number of issues that challenge us all regarding this. Overall, we must really look at many different things, such as scaling requirements, retention of information, keeping data safe, file system availability, and sharing data in heterogeneous environments.

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