Openomics: innovation drives value

Adapted from this (French) Sun Startup Essentials blog piece.

Planet Work is a Paris-based web hoster that has been operating for about 10 years now. For some time, they had been looking at virtualization technologies with the goal of offering a very competitive --low price, high availability-- entry-point hosting solution. As a member of the Sun Startup Essentials program, Planet Work worked over the past year with a local engineer in our team to evaluate what Solaris had to offer in the virtualization space. They were not disappointed.

Read on to learn how Planet Work could deploy a new iServer Solaris offering, targeted at startup developers, with a low entry-price of 19€ per month, automated ZFS-based backup service and a low cost of operation.

GixOO is launching this week its 6rounds video communication service. The coolest web 2.0 venture I have seen in quite some time! As GixOO co-founder and COO Ilan Leibovich puts it, 6rounds is a rich, interactive and personalized video chat platform that takes shared experiences and real-time collaboration to a whole new level. 6rounds combines webcams, social activities, and interactive zones to offer its users an exciting variety of experiences that they enjoy and share together. The video experience present users with broad range of opportunities: from watching videos, playing real-time games, listening to music, co-facebooking or youtubing, to shopping together and beyond. Users are also encouraged to exchange gifts, start webcam effects and use the tips machine which provides ice-breakers and advice about their chat partner.

6rounds is the first product built on the GixOO live social platform, initially developped on the LAMP stack. As a member of the Sun Startup Essentials program, GixOO connected with Sun's ISV Engineering team to test the scalability of their platform on SAMP…

"We evaluated the Sun Fire T1000 server for our product needs in Value-Added Services. Our benchmark results show significant overall performance gains over existing Sun servers. We are pleased with these results and will continue work with Sun to deploy CMT technologies in our next generation systems."
Alexander Katz, Director, Platforms Product Management, Comverse

At the time Sun released its first server line based on the revolutionary Chip Multi-Threading (CMT) a.k.a. CoolThreads processor design, Comverse was a long customer of traditional UltraSPARC systems from Sun. Over the years, they had learned to love the predictable performance of such a RISC processor pipeline, the reliability of Sun Netra servers (NEBS-certified for demanding Telco environments) and the guaranteed upward binary compatibility of the Solaris operating system. The latest supported configuration then, for the component of Comverse Messaging Alexander Katz was referring to, was 210/240-class UltraSparc3i-based systems running Solaris 9, and a typical customer deployment would include several of these servers.

In a permanent effort to strengthen customer loyalty and improve the price/performance of its solutions, Comverse challenged Sun Microsystems and our ISV Engineering group to gain an order of magnitude in price/performance for Messaging. The Telco industry had started to adopt Linux then so Lintel looked here like the default alternative and safe choice. Such a choice however was not leveraging the trust the customers had built in SPARC, the up-front cost of migrating from Solaris to Linux was high, and a me-too solution was not giving any competitive advantage to Comverse. So we introduced the Sun T-series systems and their CMT design, running Solaris 10...

The US Center for Disease Control (CDC) BioSense data warehouse for national bio-surveillance undergoes nightly updates from an SQL server to a (data mart) SAS® SPD Server which is made available to the researchers community each morning. During that time, the SPD Server goes offline. As data volume grows, nightly updates may eventually spill into the next business day, so when in 2007 CDC upgraded their server to a Sun Fire 2900 system, they knew that a simple processor upgrade would not be enough in the long run. The solution of replicating SPD Server domains was however complex (software redesign) and/or costly (full server/storage duplication).

Enter Zones and ZFS. Zones, a.k.a. Solaris Containers, are an operating system abstraction for partitioning Solaris systems --they are kinda lightweight logical instances-- allowing multiple applications to run in isolation from each other on the same physical hardware. ZFS is a new kind of filesystem that provides simple administration, transactional semantics and immense scalability. A ZFS snapshot is a consistent point-in-time image of a filesystem. A clone is a writable copy of a snapshot. Solaris creates ZFS clones quickly using no additional disk space to start with. Both Zones and ZFS were technological innovations originally introduced with Solaris 10.

Leveraging Zones and ZFS, the following solution was designed for CDC. ZFS clones of the Biosense 1TB datasets can be created within minutes in a separate Solaris Container, where one can run a second read-only instance of the SPD Server with no modifications of config files or metadata, since Zones appear as brand new Solaris instances to applications. Zones & ZFS combined are solving CDC's problem very elegantly (built-in Solaris features, 4-hour proof-of-concept!), effectively (maintenance window is confined) and at no incremental cost (no extra server/storage, no SPD Server metadata redesign). In addition, the SAS admins are able to define access rights such that the few SAS programmers can update the live SPD Server in the global zone while the general scientific community accesses the cloned data.

Maureen Chew from Sun's ISV Engineering presented this work at the SAS Global Forum 2007 in Orlando, FL. Check out her paper and presentation for more details.