All about Grid and Cloud Computing: Discover the limits

First look here: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/05/sun-microsystems-hopes-to-shake-up-storage-industry/ and than over here: http://www.forbes.com/technology/2008/11/08/sun-storage-memory-tech-enter-cx_ag_1110sun.html?feed=rss_technology - we did it :-)

I'm still playing around with the new upcoming release of 2008.11. The system is installed on a X4100 and registered as NIS client with automounter configured. Works great - it was all set up in < 3 hours :-)

This time I tried SMF and vpanels. Vpanels is great for administrative tasks, like configuring apache. SMF is the rocking alternative to old runlevel scripts. Works fine, only to register a new service you have to write a bunch of XML. XML is great to be handled by computers but bad ugly for humans...but nevermind :-) It worked after some tries...

I managed to install the system and register the applications my document management tools needs in SMF. Also added glassfish as SMF service. Everythink works fine now. And thanks to ZFS snapshot I could even roll back (but I don't want) :-)

But for know the server is running, and running, and running...

It is already some days ago that I joined Sun Microsystems and now I finally gave ZFS a shot.  You probably all know about the nice features ZFS has - so no more summary here. Feel free to browse to the website of ZFS to look for that. 

 More impressiv to me was the video I found on google video from the systemhelden guys. I must admit that it is somehow funny, there is still some nice info in it.

There is also a English version around somewhere. I like the idea and doing it as a demo is nice but a real practical solution might look different. USB sticks are not your first choice when you think about data security. The memory chips are not really high quality stuff and fail after so-and-so-much read and write operations. But anyhow nice idea - and I like the blinking of the USB sticks :-)