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20040929 Wednesday September 29, 2004

Zone counting - the lull before the storm

Heh, heh. Just when you thought I was going to give up on my Solaris 10 zone counting, you realize that I have just begun to fight! Consider it the lull before the storm.

Having run out of disk space on the Ultra 10, all hope seemed lost to hit triple digits. Alas, Scott McClure, one of our storage guru's, offered up his Sun StorEdge 6920. Here is a shot I couldn't resist taking.. That little 'ol U10 hooked up to a rack of storage. Gotta love it. Here is a transcript of the conversation Scott and I had (slightly embellished):

Scott: John, wanna use my StorEdge 6920 [Ed. Ok, he didn't say StorEdge, that's my marketing ]"
John: Scott, thanks! Yes!

Scott: OK, how much disk space?
John: How about 2 Terabytes?

Scott: Um, John, it's an Ultra 10. How many zones do you think you can hit?
John: Let me do the math, hold on ... Good point, I don't think I can hit 27,962 zones

Scott: OK, how about 100 gigabytes?
John: Let me do the math, hold on ... OK, that's 1365 zones. Hmmm. Mighty high bar to set. Don't want to intimidate the poor U10. How about 30-40GB? That's, hold on ... 546 zones at 40GB.

Scott: OK. How do you want the performance optimized? Sequential, random?
John: I dunno, is paging/swapping sequential or random? I'll be doing a lot of it when I move my swap file over to the 6920. Given the extra 4600 RPM's (not including the rotation of the earth), the 1GB of cache per tray, and the #of drives you will probably stripe over, I figure I can swap roughly 75x faster.

Scott: John, it's a U10
John: Paging out would be sequential I bet, but paging in would be fairly random. Then there's the actual zone creation ... Hey, Scott, can you make me two volumes, one tuned for random, one for sequential?

Scott: John. It's a U10.
John: Oh, yeah, that's right

Scott: I'll make it random.
John: OK, Scott, thanks for your support


Now, when I get a chance, I 'll actually create more zones. Gonna be a busy day.

(2004-09-29 07:04:29.0) Permalink Comments [9]

Comments:

Holy cow, I can't wait to see what you come up w/ before the U10 falls to it's knees.

dl

Posted by Dan Lacher on September 29, 2004 at 07:26 AM PDT #

I thought that there was a limitation of 8191 zones per Solaris instance?

And John, take the wee, sleekit, cowering beastie to at least 1GB RAM :-)

If it works out well, I will compose a poem for your U10 in the style of Robert Burns. A la http://www.emule.com/poetry/?page=poem&poem=394 .

Posted by PatrickG on September 29, 2004 at 08:10 AM PDT #

Patrick, your killin' me over here! HA! I'm not worthy, although the U10 is :)

I think I can get it up to 768K, but I don't have an extra pair of 256M sticks :(

Perhaps I'll post internally to borrow 512MB.

Posted by John Clingan on September 29, 2004 at 08:15 AM PDT #

If I grok the specs right, you'll be using FC (2GBit) to link to the 6920, right? That would make for a theoretical bandwidth of ~256MByte/s (sorry if I screwed up here, but I've never worked with "big" storage systems) - going by your 75x speedup that would mean your U10 is swapping at a measly ~4MByte/s. That seems awfully slow to me... Do you know how many zones they've tested Solaris 10 to internally, or are you going where no man has gone before? *G* Keep up the zoning... Sincerely Olaf

Posted by Olaf Mersmann on September 30, 2004 at 07:48 AM PDT #

I knew it! Someone would actually try to do the math on the 75x! I pulled that number out of my !*#&@, so I'm busted :) It was simply too much math to do for a blog. The other math is somewhat accurate (assuming 75MB/zone using 1024 instead of 1000, and not counting any swap space I move over).

We have done roughly 8K zones, but I highly doubt that it was on an Ultra 10 with 512MB RAM :)

Posted by John Clingan on September 30, 2004 at 08:00 AM PDT #

Thing is, the latency on swappping to FC will be very small. If you measure it via say, "iostat -xnc 5" you will see the wsvc_t times be very low no matter how much swapping you are doing. The large caches on the StorEdge will of course help in that regard. And the U10 is running at most a 7200rpm IDE drive. So it could in fact be close to 75x in realword situations....

Posted by PatrickG on September 30, 2004 at 05:07 PM PDT #

John, I am a bit concerned. If use this fancy new grid thingy at $1 per cpu hour is it your box I connect to? Does this mean you have now sold that service to more people so you need more zones? Dave

Posted by Dave Warnock on October 01, 2004 at 08:34 AM PDT #

HA! You caught us red handed :)

Posted by John Clingan on October 01, 2004 at 09:55 AM PDT #

So John I am halfway convinced about Solaris 10. Enough to create a new blog category of OperatingSystems with a first post So sell me Solaris!. I still have a number of questions and will use that category to post them over the next days, weeks ...

Posted by Dave Warnock on October 01, 2004 at 02:11 PM PDT #

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