Ever wished you could automate your NFS automounter maps?

Our NFS team just put back NFSv4 mirror mounts (an NFS namespace extension project) to OpenSolaris which allows an NFSv4 client to automatically mount the shared file systems it discovers on an NFSv4 server. No automounter maps to update or push. Just discover and go.

One of the design goals we've had in Solaris Storage Software over the past 4-5 years has been to simplify the management of storage and data resources. ZFS kicked off this drive for simplicity and we're using this simple-is-better philosophy to help get to Storage Nirvana -- self managing storage. The journey alone will yield relief (and some peace) from how we traditionally manage storage.

For folks who'd like to listen to a great overview of the NFsv4 Namespace Extensions projects check out Rob Thurlow's screencast.

My 14 year old daughter's youth football team won their Superbowl game yesterday (!) and I was just mulling over some lessons I've learned from her this football season.

Get to your spot . Kate heard this more times that she cared to remember this season. As a defensive end, her "spot" on the right side was just inside the line of scrimmage to make sure that no one ran the ball around her end. Her other job was to interfere with any passes that came her way. Oh.. and sack the quarterback (more on that later).

In yesterday's game Kate -- the tallest and skinniest kid on her team -- was double-teamed and slammed to the ground as often as possible. Another big kid, Chandler, was fighting off two offensive line guys all game as well. It appeared that the other team's strategy was to wear out the two biggest kids on defense in hopes of opening up scoring opportunities. In a display of true teamwork, the rest of the defensive team stepped up to the challenge and stopped several runs and passes.

On the offense side of the story, our team was able to put 6 points on the scoreboard in the first quarter but the rest of the game was a hard fought battle moving up and down the field with no further points from either team.

Fast forward to the end of the game. The other team was just inside the 10 yard line with one last play to go when they sent all of their eligible receivers into the end zone. Kate brushed by her opponent and ran toward the quarterback with arms fully extended anticipating a pass. In just a few heartbeats she reached the quarterback, wrapped those long arms around him and danced him to the ground ending their drive and the game.

The other team Moms exploded (they're Kate's most ardent fans) while I almost broke my voice hollering. What a great ending to a very tough game. We shouldn't have won on paper. The other team was bigger and more experienced... and to be fair... well coached. But everyone did their job and put their heart into the game and sometimes that means more than size or experience.

Day in... Day out... Get to your spot. Seize the opportunity when it comes along.

You can learn a lot from your kids if you just let them teach you.

Today we had the Superbowl party. Kate received the "Queen of the team"  (she was the only girl in the football conference) and "King of sacks" awards. I have to give a lot of credit to Kate's coaches. They took a chance on a kid who had never played football , dealt with the ensuing dynamics on the team ("how am I supposed to tackle a girl?"), never let up on her and always encouraged her.

 

Several of us Sun storage software types are at the SNIA Storage Developer Conference this week in San Jose, CA. The agenda has shaped up nicely and attendees can hear talks on everything from device updates and protocols all the way up the software stack to the latest in file systems (ZFS) to SNIA's fixed content standards effort -- XAM (eXtensible Access Method).

Helping to kick off the conference will be Richard Stallman talking about free software following by other keynotes including Jeff Bonwick's "The General-Purpose Storage Revolution" talk.

Think about that... free and open software... general purpose components... for storage.

When we started down the path to open sourcing our Solaris Storage software a couple of years ago very few folks in the storage industry were interested in having a conversation about open source software and general purpose components to solve storage problems.

While the storage industry is still dominated by proprietary companies change is on the wind. I like Sun's position in the upcoming storm. We're focused on collaboration (open standards) and sharing (open source) to bring about innovation (open storage).

 Oh... the memory stick? It's our OpenSolaris Storage Starter Kit that we'll be giving away at the conference. Hurry... I think they'll go fast. You can get one by showing us your OpenSolaris user registration at the conference (while supplies last).

I have to admit that I've gone through some back-and-forth inside my own head about Sun's choice to change our stock symbol from SUNW to JAVA. I've been with Sun long enough now that I joke that I started with Sun straight out of junior high school :^) and I guess I've just gotten used to SUNW.

This Sunday we were rewatching "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" and I caught a line that seemed appropriate in light of the stock symbol change...

Nick Portokalos: Don't let your past dictate who you are, but let it be part of who you will become.
Toula Portokalos: Nick that's beautiful.
Nick Portokalos: Yeah that dear Abby really knows what she's talking about. 

Thanks Dear Abby...

We received the following quote from an OpenSolaris Storage community member recently...

"I've been watching various storage-related projects spring up, and RFE putbacks and have notice (with a grin on my face) how Solaris is being positioned as the most excellent storage OS. A veritable swiss army knife for tossing data to and fro."

 

This was in response to our OpenSolaris Comstar project -- Common Multiprotocol SCSI Target -- a neat piece of  infrastructure that will provide a common framework for iSCSI , Fibre Channel, and iSER target functionality in Solaris.

The word's getting out... OpenSolaris and Solaris make great storage platforms.

We've had good luck using Solaris in a number of our storage offerings -- Thumper (Sun Fire X4500), Honeycomb (STK5800), and the STK Virtual Tape Library Plus. The scalability of Solaris along with our focused storage software investments -- ZFS, (p)NFS, SAM-FS, Shared QFS, iSCSI and Fibre Channel infrastructure -- helps Sun offer innovative storage appliances built out of commodity building blocks from our own server, disk, and tape portfolios.

Solaris runs on many platforms other than Sun (789 non-Sun systems for Solaris 10, 851 non-Sun systems for Solaris Express Developer Edition). And supports over 1565 components such as external storage subsystems, networking cards, and other i/o devices.

Can we help you create a great storage solution? Let us know how we can help...

We had a nice progressive social hour today... grabbed a drink and then hit different offices for Mexican chips/dips, Spanish tapas, Italian breads, and good old 'merican artery clogging sausage, cheese and Rotel dip. Thanks Mike, Deb, and Scott!

I did the tapas and was asked about this particular item... (aren't recipes the original open source?)

New Potatoes with Spanish Olive Tapenade

12 new potatoes (boiled until just done, sliced in half, little scoop from the middle for the tapenade)
Note: I think you could also use hollowed out cherry tomatoes...
Spanish Olive Tapenade (partial recipe from Gourmet Magazine) 

• 1/2 cup Spanish olives with pimento
• 1 1/2 teaspoons drained capers
• 1/4 teaspoon freshly grated lemon zest
• 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

Had these with a nice Argentine Malbec (yum) because I couldn't find the Spanish Tempranillo I thought I had downstairs.

Other tapas included Manchego cheese with grape tomatoes in herbed olive oil and Manchego with dried apricots... both on skewers. Although not technically a tapa, I also served fresh berries glued onto brownie bites with the following frosting. Gotta have that chocolate fix!

Browning Frosting (don't forget the fresh berries on top!)

• 1 cup sour cream
• 1 cup Cool Whip (ummm... it works well in this recipe)
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 Tblsp powered sugar

Enjoy... 

Over beer last night I learned that the first code drop of our native OpenSolaris CIFS client was scheduled for release today. OpenSolaris can now access files on file servers that speak the Microsoft CIFS protocol (SMB).

Great job Rob, Mark, Pavan and crew!

This CIFS client project is a nice complement to the OpenSolaris Winchester project which enables OpenSolaris to operate in a native Active Directory (AD) environment.
 

Oh... the beer? Laughing Lab Scottish Ale. A great beer from Colorado Spring's Bristol Brewing Company.

 

I was reading one of our local papers, the Boulder Dailey Camera, this morning over coffee and the business section had their annual survey of the largest local companies. Sun came in first again this year with 3471 employees closely followed by IBM at 3400 employees.

I started doing some math after a couple of cups of coffee and noticed two things:

• 10% of Sun's employees are employed here in Colorado
• 1% of IMB's employees are employed in Colorado
• Sun's employees cranked out about $380K in revenue last year
• IBM's employees delivered about $257.5K

 

Now I'm a Sun die-hard and a little biased but I'm proud of a team that delivers strong revenue per employee. 

We have some other great high tech firms here at the foot of the Rocky Mountains -- Ball Aerospace, Level(3), Seagate, Covidien, Amgen, West Corp., Lockheed Martin, Sandoz, Micro Motion, Ricoh, Xilinx, EDS, Epsilon, Medtronic, Lexmark, DigitalGlobe, and Array BioPharma to name some of the bigger employers. We suspect two other storage-related companies would be in the top mix, Brocade and McData, but didn't supply their company's bios.

Storage, printers, biotech, device monitoring, internet infrastructure... hmmm... wonder what kind of interesting mashup could come from the folks in these fields?

... has reached a significant open milestone today. The Solaris parallel NFS prototype has been posted on the OpenSolaris pNFS project page. Sun and a number of our IETF friends are busy finishing up the pNFS standard which uses a metadata and data server architecture much like a number of proprietary shared file systems available today -- Luster, Panasas, and others. Here's a picture I borrowed:

 

What sets the pNFS effort apart is the marriage of open standards and open source. The pNFS standards and interoperability efforts are benefiting from the Linux pNFS work at the University of Michigan as well as the OpenSolaris community pNFS effort. Just a week or so ago, pNFS vendors got together in Austinfor a Bakeoff to do interoperability testing. The open standards and open source collaboration are really starting to bear fruit... (that's all that we're allowed to say :^)

 Want to know more about pNFS and how it might fit in your environment? Check out Robin Harris' blog for a great overview.
 

and let us know what you think. Sun's StorageTek Availability Suite is now free to download and ready for the open road.

 

It's now officially summer and a roadtrip sounds good. While it looks like it was a bit chilly at Stonehenge,

 

we started off summer here in Broomfield (Colorado) with record setting heat (97 F) and we've stayed in the 90+ F range each day since!

You've come to the right place.

I'm a little late to the party but the SAM-QFS OpenSolaris project went live this month. Nice job Ted and Cindy!

Shared QFS and SAM (Storage Archive Manager) have quite a legacy in big data and HPC environments. These products are used in interesting configurations to stream video, archive bank data, store lots and lots of Homeland-security type of data... the list is pretty lengthy. SAM-QFS is quite a nice fit with Sun's overall storage software portfolio and now it's starting down the path of open communities and collaboration.

If you want to test drive Sun's SAM-QFS commercial binary, you can download SAM and Shared QFS for free. For more detailed product information check out the engineering team's blog.

The first bit of source code to be opened is libsam, a library/API that allows you to manage data in a samfs file system from an application. With libsam you can...

• Archive - copying a file from samfs to archive media

• Release - freeing up the disk cache by letting go of archived files that no longer meet on-disk retention criteria

• Stage - bringing a file back from archive media to the disk cache

• Recycle - removing redundant copies or older versions of files from archive media

For those of you who missed out on our Honeycomb SDK and emulator memory stick giveaway at JavaOne (the 1GB sticks were sweet!), we've posted the SDK and emulator on the Sun Download Center.

We'd love to hear your feedback on these interfaces.

The SDK can help you quickly modify your data intensive application to preprocess, store, and retrieve data on the Honeycomb storage system. The emulator (really a single node Honeycomb server) will help you test out your application modficiations.

For more information on Honeycomb check out our OpenSolaris Honeycomb project page.

but I'm out now! I did time recently in the Muscular Dystrophy Association Jailhouse on a beautiful May afternoon here in Broomfield, Colorado.

 

Our Sun Colorado team raised over $16,000 to send kids to summer camp, fund further research, and provide wheelchairs and other equipment.

Interested in donating yourself?

My online donation web site is open until June 2, 2007.

 Thanks very much in advance for your contributions to MDA...

We just opened the Honeycomb OpenSolaris community -- a project page and discussion forum focused on addressing the needs of fixed content storage. Honeycomb is an systems approach to managing write-once data that includes object-oriented C and Java interfaces for data-intensive applications and a storage server that scales gracefully and protects the data through self-healing techniques.

Why is fixed content storage interesting? Think YouTube, online photo services, your medical records including xrays, digital books and libraries... all these services do best when the data they need has rich descriptions (metadata) so the applications can find just the data you're looking for.

How much fixed content is there? There are some folks at Berkeley (Hal Varian) who's research let them to estimate that 80% of today's data is fixed content -- it will never be modified. And that the growth rate for fixed content data will reach 90% through 2010 (compared to modified data which is expected to grow at 60%).

If you'd like to learn more, join us at JavaOne this week for more details on Honeycomb and the STK 5800 -- Sun's commercial implementation based on Honeycomb, Solaris 10 and an innovative system design that combines inexpensive disks, load balancing. and the SunFire x64 server platform.

Oh... and I promise to take it easy on the puns for Honeycomb this week as I write more blog entries... it's just soooo tempting.
 

 

 

I had a great open source chat with our storage partners the other day and as a result received a community contribution to our OpenSolaris Community Green Chili recipe from Charlie Tierney.

I love the way this community thing works... Here's the updated recipe.
Feel free to distribute under the Chili Development and Distribution License.

OpenSolaris Community Healthy Green Chili
Original recipe from Craig Toogood/Mark Nelson
Healthy modifications by Charlie Tierney

3-5# organic or free-range pork chops (example: Niman Ranch pork from Trader Joe’s)
1/2 large organic onion, finely chopped
2 cloves organic garlic 4 fresh whole green organic chili peppers, cut into strips
1 fresh whole diced green organic chili pepper
4 fresh whole diced organic jalapenos
1 qt. canned organic tomatoes (example: Muir Glen fire-roasted tomatoes)
2 tsp. salt
2-4 tbsp. olive oil
1/2 cup stoneground whole wheat flour (do not use enriched or bromated flour)
2 1/2 cup water

- dice and de-fat pork chops, brown in skillet with onion and garlic (brown in Olive Oil)
- in 6-qt crock pot, combine: pork (with fat drained and saved), green chili, jalapenos, tomatoes, and salt
- make gravy in skillet with 5-7 T pork fat, flour, and water; add gravy to crock pot, stir, cook on low for nine hours