Follow the Ships in Singapore... - "Flying into Singapore, one of the worlds largest ports, I noticed something odd.  There seemed to be too many ships anchored in the waters..." - Bob Porras

L2ARC Screenshots - "Back before the Fishworks project went public, I posted an entry to explain how the ZFS L2ARC worked (Level 2 Cache) - which is a flash memory based cache currently intended for random read workloads. I was itching to show screenshots from Analytics, which I'm now able to do. From these screenshots, I'll be able to describe in detail how the L2ARC performs..." - Brendan Gregg (that sexy cub)

What have L2ARC and a furniture shop in common .... - "In the last week i´ve got some questions how the L2ARC works. I thought a moment about it and came up with the following description. The whole model of caching with two layers is similar to IKEA..." - Joerg Moellenkamp

In this video, Sun's Chris Wood presents on the company's Open Storage strategy. Recorded at the Sun HPC Consortium in Dresden, Germany, June 15, 2008.

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In this video, Harriet Coverston presents on SAM-QFS. Recorded at the Sun HPC Consortium in Dresden, Germany, June 15, 2008.

download "Intelligent Storage" for iPod

Be careful of assumptions - "I had been working on fixing 6775211: mirror mounts use the zcred; should use caller's cr augmented w/ PRIV_SYS_MOUNT before the Xmas break. I had it down to unit testing and thanks to Nico Williams, I even had some great unit tests. I just ran out of time to work on the bug.

Well it jumped in priority from a P4 to a P2 and was impacting other engineers. So I thought it might be easy to dust off and finish. I was wrong..." - Tom Haynes

Sun Storage 7000 for Oracle- "Jeffrey T. Wright and Sridhar Ranganathan wrote an excellent whitepaper about the Sun Storage 7000 series for Oracle. It´s really worth a read for everybody thinking about databases on NAS: Sun Blueprint - Configuring Sun Storage 7000 Systems for Oracle Databases." - thanks, Joerg!

Sun Storage 7110 Unified Storage System - "The 7110 delivers a complete network storage solution with no hidden catches. Both NAS and IP SAN are supported, performance is very good, and Sun won't be beaten on value..." - PC Pro magazine

Dan Maslowski presents, November 2008.

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Sun's Open Storage play: Do unto others... - "Sun Microsystems spent a decade getting pummeled by lower-cost, commodity Linux servers. It wants to spend the next decade doing the same to its storage rivals..." - Matt Asay (thanks, Joerg!)

Video: What Open Storage can do for your HPC environment - via the HPC Watercooler.

Connectathon 2009 Talk schedule posted - "We've posted the talk schedule for Connectathon 2009. They will be presented for a 3 day period of Feb 23rd - 25th..." - Tom Haynes

The OpenSolaris Bible: Hop on over to Jim Grisanzio for a full list of related links. Warmest congrats to Nick, Jerry, and Dave!

How To Build A Home ZFS File Server - ZFS Setup - Mark Musante points us to an excellent article by Jermaine Maree: "After getting the fancy new file server put together it is time to install the operating system. There are several options, but I decided to keep it simple and install OpenSolaris 2008.11. The other version (there are several) that many seem to download is OpenSolaris Express Community Edition, but it included extra applications that I did not want. For my needs I wanted a basic OS and planned to install the extra stuff as needed. So, what do you need to do?..."

The hundred or so people who joined us a last September's Open Storage Summit had a great time, shared a lot, and learned a lot. Won't you join us for this one? Conveniently co-located with USENIX FAST, the Open Storage Summit will be held at the Grand Hyatt in San Francisco on Monday, February 23rd. Attendance is free, and we'll probably feed you as well. ; )

Please register now and share your ideas for agenda items and speakers.

Death of a Hero: Robert Snively - "Bob Snively is the storage giant you've probly never heard of. Employed at Sun for a number of years and recently moved to Brocade, if you dig into the SCSI and Fibre Channel standards you'll see his name again and again. His accomplishments are greater than I can list with any accuracy..." - Ben Rockwood'

Understanding ZFS: Transaction Groups & Disk Performance - "I've been deeply concerned about the number of people who continue to use iostat as the means to universally judge IO as "good" or "bad". Before I explain why, lets review iostat..." - Ben again

44th P.O.T.U.S. - Yes We Can - "Today the 44th President of the Unites States of America is sworn into office. For me it signifies not only eliminated barriers but also the beginning of new horizons..." - Bob Porras

 -

Just wanted to let everyone know that the OpenSolaris Storage Community page has been redesigned.

The new home page now provides a What's New section, an easy way to see the latest Storage Stop blog entries and storage announce posts, and a Video Highlight section.

Peter Buckingham and I plan to provide regular updates to both the What's New and Video Highlight sections, so keep checking back.

If you have any questions or suggestions, email me (paul.kasper at sun.com), leave a comment, or post to the storage discuss forum.

Torch passed! "OpenSolaris in Review" has a new editor - "I'm absolutely thrilled to announce, that Scott Seighman is continuing to write the OpenSolaris in review posts that I'd been maintaining for a while in this category..." - Tim Foster

Managing a Bestseller - "...The 7000 has one remarkably interesting attribute: it learns. The longer it's doing its job, interacting with applications and serving data, the faster it becomes..." - Jonathan Schwartz

Sun Videos - You've seen a lot of video pass through this blog about Sun storage and the technologies behind it. But, in my role as videoblogger for all of Sun's Solaris Data, Availability, Scalability and HPC Software, I also shoot a lot of footage about other things, as well as try to share the knowledge about how you can do your own video.

Because Sun video (mine and others') tends to get spread out all over the Internet (there are three Sun hosting sites, plus Google Video, YouTube, blip.tv...), I thought it would be useful to have a central point to aggregate and tag it to help you find what you're interested in. So hop on over to Sun Videos and have a look. Right now I've barely made a start on my own stuff, but I've invited other Sun folks to join and start posting and tagging their own video, so this is likely to grow more extensive and useful over time.

In this video Ray Austin of Sun Microsystems shows off its breakthrough storage capabilities in the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Family.

OpenSolaris Test Farm: Easier Access - "Jim Walker continues to expand and open up the OpenSolaris Test Farm Service. Note the invite in Jim's mail directly to the OpenSolaris User Groups. Seems like a pretty valuable service for OSUGs to take advantage of. Also, Jim worked to make accessing the test farm much easier. You don't need to sign the SCA. Excellent news. Test away ... " - Jim Grisanzio

Appliance of Science - "...I've just built a Fishworks environment. Easy-to-use, easy-to-configure, a tad resource heavy but a really nice GUI..." - Storagebod

...and we're back! With news to catch up on. First off:

Save The Date! for the next Storage Summit, to be held on February 23, 2009, just prior to (and co-located with) the USENIX FAST conference in San Francisco. The last one (in September, just before SNIA SDC) featured some great speakers, a fun party, and time to just sit and talk storage with some of the experts.  Watch this space for more news, and we look forward to seeing you there!

Show Your JBODs a Little Love - Brendan Gregg graphically demonstrates that they don't like being shouted at.

...and don't miss Brendan's JBOD Analytics example - "The Analytics feature of the Sun Storage 7000 series provides a fantastic new insight into system performance. Some screenshots have appeared in various blog posts posts, but there is a lot more of Analytics to show..."

and, last but never least, Bob Porras got snowed in and reflected that Sometimes Nature Makes You Take a Pause.

New Scrub Code - "To fix a longstanding bug (6343667, scrub/resilver has to start over when snapshot is taken), I ended up rewriting the ZFS scrub code (putback in OpenSolaris build 94). Mark Maybee and I were already working on "bp (block pointer) rewrite (or relocate)", functionality that will allow us to traverse all the blocks in the pool and move them around." - Matthew Ahrens