Sun BluePrints: Sun Reviewed Best Practices

I am an optimistic person.  My job position in Sun is officially “Solutions Engineer” which is an interesting title only when you consider that everyone else in Silicon Valley has the word “Engineer” in their job description.  (I once saw a badge at a local theme park in the North Bay which had the ride operator's name on it “Suzy” but also had underneath it her title, “Experience Engineer”.  She must know the badge dude.)  So, let's take out the word Engineer.  What am I left with that describes me as a unique and vibrant person within a cool and dynamic place like Sun?  “Solutions.”

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The Sun Fire x64 servers come pre-installed with Solaris 10. However, that does not mean that Linux and Windows users have to deploy their OS the hard way. Sun provides a free tool making OS installation simple and easy. Still installing your Linux/Windows OS the old way? Downloading drivers manually? Using a floppy drive??? Well, here is the good news: It is called SIA!

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Just published: the definitive overview of the Sun xVM hypervisor, with detailed discussions on installation, configuration, and troubleshooting.

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 I am behind on this blog, just catching up. Although it is not the announcement vehicle for new content—I hope you are visiting the web page to see what is new—I do want to provide a little perspective. After a dry spell, we suddenly have a whole slew of new and interesting documents. In fact, in the last week we have posted 142 pages of very diverse content:

Using Logical Domains and CoolThreads Technology: Improving Scalability and System Utilization, by Ning Sun and Lee Anne Simmons documents a fascinating internal project that examined the application of LDoms to our CMT products to improve scalability and system utilization. It was found that configurations with 6 logical domains exhibited scalable performance improvements, yet still did not fully utilize system resources of the SPARC Enterprise T5220 server. A configuration with 12 logical domains increased the overall throughput by over 50 percent compared to the  6-domain configuration, while almost fully utilizing the available CPU resources assigned to the logical domains.

Using Solaris Cluster and Sun Cluster Geographic Edition is another contribution by longtime Sun BluePrints author Tim Read. There has been lots written about Sun's many virtualization technologies. Tim provides a comprehensive survey of the application of these to the Solaris Cluster software (and its Open High Availability Cluster open source equivalent) with an eye on best practices.

Sun's Reference Architecture for Video Surveillance with ipConfigure ESM provides a brief overview of the opportunity to address the Video Surveillance market. The document presents an architecture built on the foundation of our Sun Fire X4500 Server as the archive server, used in conjunction with ipConfigure's ESM software and a pair of Sun Fire X4100 M2 servers to provide both management and drive a simulation. The system was tested under both server-based and camera-based motion-detection scenarios and demonstrated considerable scalability. This document provides both background and hard data, representing a important integration of our server and storage products.

The Managed Desktop Factory: Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Software as a Service focuses on the application of ITIL methodologies to optimally deploy desktop environments throughout the enterprise via "Managed Desktop Factories" using thin clients, PCs, and even mobile devices.

We have more exciting and interesting content on the way, including a "definitive" blueprint on our Solaris  xVM Hyperisor and a detailed view on Sun's own energy efficient datacenters.

Yesterday a momentous switchover took place: the www.sun.com/blueprints page was redirected to the new Wiki. That may seem like a minor event, but it eliminates a redundant feed and gets everyone reading out of the same book. And, the new book is well worth reading. Although still a work in progress, it now gives us the ability to get content up almost instantly. We have dropped the monthly edition designation and are publishing as quickly as possible.

 

Another enhancement, which I hope is appreciated, is that the summary page for each article has a more complete description of the contents, including the table of contents for longer articles. It is our hope that this will help the busy reader better assess the potential value of the blueprint. Also included on the summary page are two important additional pieces of information: the author biographies and the acknowledgments. Anyone who has tried to write (or practices it regularly) knows that it is a time-consuming avocation. Busy engineers who take time (often personal) to inscribe their best practices so formally demonstrate a special level of commitment: we should honor them. Likewise, those who assist with advice, review and corrections deserve everyone's thanks.

 

What about the future? More content, of course. We have a summer intern starting the end of the month and have great plans for her time:

 

• We will get the rest of the books posted.
• In response to a reasonable request, we will make sure articles are clearly designated with their publication date. This is always a potentially important gauge of relevance; the older a publication, the more likely it is dated.
• We are thinking of adding summary pages for older articles. Right now, we go back through 2004. It is my belief that earlier content is suspect, but it is always difficult to "throw away" technical content that might be of value.

We are also considering new media, such as podcast interviews, to enhance at least some of the blueprints. We are very much interested in your ideas.

 

Today marks something of a milestone for the Sun BluePrints Program: the first truly new content published first on the Sun BluePrints Wiki. This represents a significant change in our process: our destiny is now in our own hands, in which we manage the content entirely ourselves using Sun's collection of channels for Wikis, blogs, forums and posting media. First of all, the notion of "monthly edition" is gone: we post content when it is ready. This is a good thing. Now, when we have a new PDF document, we post it ourselves on mediacast.sun.com, and we are able to assign a permalink to it; it is also easier to update this document as minor corrections are made.

 

There is always a moment of hesitation when one switches to something entirely new. After all, the "old" process worked for nine years. Or, did it? Actually, getting new content and updates posted involved more fuss than sometimes it was worth, and as I have mentioned earlier, our ability to create lists to browse by subject had broken down. No, the old way was dated and limited, and the new way is full of opportunity and power!

 

Meanwhile, let me introduce our latest article: Optimizing Systems to Use Flash Memory as a Hard Drive Replacement, by Om Narasimhan. We are entering an age for which for which flash memory storage devices, while not exactly cheap, provide significant advantages as a systems storage device. This new blueprint addresses this topic for Linux systems, specifically, although concepts apply to Solaris. To take a quote from the article:

When implemented properly, flash devices can boot systems faster and provide higher performance. Flash devices also naturally stay cooler than hard drives and can operate across a wider range of thermal conditions. However, installing an operating system in the default manner on a flash drive may not result in the best device performance or longevity.

A with using flash memory in place of disk is that the longevity of the flash medium is dependent on how often it is written to. So, it stands to reason that one would want to minimize write activity: that is the central topic of this blueprint. There are a number of useful recommendations here. It is a very readable article that will bring you up to speed on a topic that will have growing importance.

 

I would like to add one special note. By definition, Sun BluePrints articles are written and backed by Sun engineers. The originator of much of the material in this article left Sun before publication, and therefore is mentioned in the acknowledgments section: Phillip Martin. I want to thank Phillip for providing Om with such an excellent starting point for this blueprint.

 

The Sun BluePrints Program is now starting to post PDFs of the many books published in years past. We are out of the book publishing business, that is unless...

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We are working to expand our reach: more content reaching more readers. The first step is the new Wiki format, which not only makes it faster and easier for us to publish, but which encourages more interactivity. The next step will be creating new forms of content, possibly using different channels. The obvious candidate is to publish shorter blueprints directly in Wiki form; readers that want a PDF can have it generated for them via the Confluence engine; it won't have the fancy cover, and the graphics won't be as high a resolution. How about other media forms, such as podcasts? There is a lot of interest at Sun over the many social networking tools out there. How about using Second Life?

 

I'll be getting help. I have several open job requisitions: two for college intern positions, one for a new college graduate. For information, see www.sun.com/studentzone—just search for "kemer" to pull them up. All will be a part of a new team whose charter is not to only explore new media and channels, but to help create the content itself. Pretty cool job, I think: you get to work with some of Sun's best engineers to extract their pearls of wisdom about how to build better solutions.

An important event quietly happened yesterday: the Sun BluePrints Program saw the return of Vicky Hardman as program manager. The Dot Com crash had a ripple effect, painfully reducing the staff and budget dedicated to this program, significantly changing the way we did business. Vicky presided over what I would call the "golden age" of the program, and was very good at keeping things moving along and (especially) not letting them fall through the cracks. Her return heralds a revitalization of this nine year old program: just in time for our new Wiki front-end.

 

If you examine our current "archives", we have content stretching back to  April, 1999; we are about to enter our tenth year! Looking at these older articles is like strolling down memory lane, but technology is moving on, and much of that content is so old that it is not clear what we should do with it. Does anyone care about Solaris 8 any longer? How about PC Netlink 1.0? For this reason, I point only back through 2004 on the new Wiki page. Still, the information pack rat in me can't stand the thought of throwing anything away; perhaps I'll collect it and tag it something like "antiquated." I'm open to ideas.

 

As for other ideas: it is my hope to soon launch a second class of blueprint that will be published directly on the Wiki, i.e., not in PDF. Such articles would still go through our review process and we would  provide some minor editorial polishing, but they won't be the large, formal PDF documents. There are great advantages to this approach, particularly for content that is subject to frequent updating. It's not "either/or": both will exist. For those of you who are fans of BigAdmin, as am I, we are not intending to "compete." Indeed, BigAdmin has pointed to Sun BluePrints articles for years, and I'm going to get more active (now that Vicky is back!) to ensure that our latest articles are properly placed there. An important difference is that the content delivered by the Sun BluePrints Program always has a Sun engineer behind it and always goes through a review process. BigAdmin hosts many "best practice" documents from a wider source, providing a vital service to all.

 

We are entering "a new golden age," as prior principle contributor John Howard (who has moved on) used to joke. John, we will try to do you proud!

Just what is "best"? Should we use the term "best practices?"
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Kemer starts to discover the real power behind tagging.

 

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I'm wiping my blog slate clean and promise to be actually interesting. At least, I hope so.[Read More]