Starting July 15th at 9 am (local time in Brisbane, Australia - GMT +10), we'll be streaming the Kernel Conference Australia. Go to our UStream page for the live stream and to participate and ask questions via chat.
Of particular interest to the storage crowd: Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore on ZFS Deduplication! 9:15 am tomorrow.
Test Center: Sun's stellar NAS in a can - "...after only a few minutes of use, I was smitten. It's very attractive and very accessible. In fact, it may be the most complete filer interface I've ever seen, blowing the doors off Network Appliance's Web-based manager..." - Paul Venezia, InfoWorld Test Center
Flash vs Cash - "...both Sun and its competitors are selling flash - but with Sun your cash gets you cache, and with the others it just gets you flash..." - Paul Murphy, via Joerg Moellenkamp
ACLs on Shares - "With build 109 of Open Solaris, a new feature has been added to the CIFS server - ACLs on Shares..." - Doug McCallum
Countdown to the OpenSolaris Storage Summit - "We're wrapping up the final details for next Monday's OpenSolaris Storage Summit and hope to see you there! We have some great talks lined up (SmugMug, GoGrid, SETI along with the latest information on Sun's Open Storage efforts) and a Community Marketplace where you can chat with companies who are part of the OpenSolaris Storage community..." - Lynn Rohrer
Not the Bandwidth... It's the Latency That Gets You - "Data needs to be stored or retrieved for devices that span from the small mp3 player to that large cloud that you provide and/or utilize. Specific to the storage of your data, performance fundamentally comes down to how you manage your reads and writes." - Bob Porras
ZFS Mandates - "While making ZFS required for court and police NAS/SAN devices it would be nice if people would use ZFS because it is so obviously better, not because its use is mandated." - Mark Musante
OpenSolaris Community Lending Project on Kiva - "...This is exactly why
global communities are valuable: people who are passionate embrace
opportunities to solve problems in new ways. If people are empowered
and able to connect, they self organize and get things done. They just
do it. So, want to help change someone`s life? Just jump right in." - Jim Grisanzio
DIY your OpenStorage device - words and pictures from YD Zhang
Playing with 'sec=none' and using AUTH_NONE - "AUTH_NONE is one of the least understood security flavors you can use
with NFS (see nfssec(5) for more details). When you share a resource,
you can specify the security flavors with 'sec'. You can also specify
an anonymous uid with 'anon'. I mention that because the two interact..." - Tom Haynes
and... if you'll be in the Bay Area on Monday, February 23rd, please join us at the Open Storage Summit!
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
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
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.
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.
