thin slice: a thin slice of business intelligence news and views

When asked about Sun Microsystems, one word will always spring to the top of my mind: innovation

There is such a fantastic DNA in this company that looks to push boundaries and make things better - ok, we often do not got the message across well but the effort and dedication shown by employees always makes me proud.

To emphasis this point again there is great news as told by Jeff Bonwick earlier this week: "ZFS now has built-in deduplication"

Deduplication is a process to remove duplicate copies of data, whether it's files, blocks or bytes.

It's probably easier to explain with an example: suppose you have a database with company addresses, the location 'London' will exist for quite a few customers, so instead of having this entry 100 times, there will be one entry and the other 99 references to the original entry. So it saves space and lookup time as it's likely that the reference will already be loaded in cache.

How easy is it to set up?

Assuming you have a storage pool named 'tank' and you want to use dedup, just type this:

zfs set dedup=on tank

There is more to it, so read Jeffs blog for the whole story.

I'm guess this should appear shortly in the OpenSolaris /Dev builds, which will feed into the next OpenSolaris release (2010.02) and in Solaris 10 Update 9. Once it's released, I'll try and run some tests to see the savings I get.

This should also feed into the FreeBSD project. Such a shame OSX has dumped their ZFS project.

After the announcements from Oracle Open World and new TPC benchmark, a lot of focus has been on Sun and the innovation DNA that drives the company.  The announcements focus on flash and their increasing use in computing: 

• Sun Flash Accelerator F20 PCIe Card

• Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array

So what is the secret sauce in these?  These are essentially caching data and are made up of 94GB (4 x 24GB modules) of single-level cell NAND flash, in the F20 card and a staggering 1.92TB (80 modules) for the F5100 flash array.

The F5100 Flash Array has 64 SAS lanes (16 x 4-wide ports), 4 domains and SAS zoning, It can perform 1.6m read IOPS and 1.2M write IOPS, with a bandwidth of 12.8GB/sec.

This read IOPS figure is equivalent to 3,000 hard drives in 14 rack cabinets. The F5100 uses 1/100th of the space and power, of such a collection of hard drives.

This is an amazing database accelerator for Oracle and MySQL. The unit can be zoned into 16 partitions, one for each of up to 16 hosts. The device can form part of a Sun ZFS hybrid storage pool, embracing solid state and hard disk drives.

Further Notes: Sequential Read = 9.7GB/sec; Read/Write Latency (1M transfers) = 0.41ms/0.28ms; Average Power 300 watts (Idle = 213W ; 100% = 386W).  More spec info here.

So if you have need to speed up your Databases, Storage grids, HPC computing or Financial modeling look at what flash SSDs can offer.

Download the Sun Flash Analyzer and install on your server and see where SSDs can help accelerate system performance today.

It won't be long before all computers come with flash as standard as either a separate or hybrid disk to speed up response times . . . OpenSolaris can already do this today with ZFS Storage Pools.

Hot on the heals of recent announcements comes the latest update to Solaris 10, Update 8 also know as 10/09:

Here's some key new features:

• Patching enhancements: Turbo Patching and Parallel Patching for Containers
• New ZFS features: Quotas, Flash Archives and Cache devices
• Support for disks over 1TB - this is limited to systems running 64 bit kernel
• Software Updates: PostgreSQL 8.37, NTP 4.2.5, Samba 3.0.35
• Numerous other system performance, driver and device enhancements.

Further information:

Documents

Download Solaris 10, U8

What's now EOF (Software no longer supported) 

Gentlemen (and women) start your downloads  

For those not in the know, Sun Ray is a thin client technology provided by Sun, with no local disk storage and they are totally stateless.

These very smart, very low power consuming machines (4 watts!) or integrated monitors allow you to keep a session (Solaris, Windows, Linux) running on the server and access at each machine you insert your java card. 

This allows you to do some work, pull out your card, walk over to a colleagues desk or meeting room and insert your card and pull up the same session.

Now that the intro is done . . . Microsoft have embraced this technology at their Enterprise Engineering Center (EEC). More info here.

Now the other piece of cool news:  Sun Ray Soft Client is now available as part of the Sun Ray Software 5 Early Access program:

The Sun Ray Soft Client is a software application that easily installs on common client operating systems and provides the ability to connect to a Sun Ray server and initiate a Sun Ray desktop session from a Windows laptop or desktop computer. The Sun Ray Soft Client also provides the flexibility to 'hotdesk' to and from your Sun Ray thin client and any supported Sun Ray Soft Client enabled PC. Currently available for Windows only.

I have my main computer as Solaris dual boot with Windows 2008, to keep it updated I recently booted into Windows to install SP2.

After some time downloading, asking me to quit everything and rebooting a few times the installation failed at 100% at Stage 3 with the following message:

Installation was not successful 

Unspecified error 

Error: E_FAIL(0x80004005)

Sigh, how hard is it to write in English or to check for certain parameters before installation?   This is one reason why I love Solaris/OpenSolaris, you can have multiple boot environments and update them while using another one.  Then the only downtime is a reboot to enable and switch to the new boot environment.

At work they have implemented it and it has reduced the possible downtime from 6 - 8 hours down to 2 - they still allow this much time in case of any issues.

After much searching, I finally found our that for SP2 to install on Windows 2008, it needs to be on the active partition . . . so after a quick change with Disk Management SP2 successfully installed.

Then it was a quick boot into failsafe Solaris to make the Solaris partition active again. 

All updated!

An appropriate title for my first blog as this is the 'new' me going forward and leaving the 'old' unblogger behind. I'm also starting an MBA course so will be blowing the cobwebs off my study brain and changing my life for the next year or so if I continue after that.

It's also an appropriate title as I recently upgraded my home computer to run zfs root: - I previously had 2 ufs slices and proceeded to use live upgrade to move between them when updating between editions of solaris community edition (also known as nevada). - I had been meaning to do it for some time as it's much quicker when copying (as it clones, think seconds rather than 50 minutes to copy 7GB) and is more robust with all that zfs goodness.

I just created a new zfs pool on the unused ufs liveupgrade slice, no need to re-format, mind you I did need to use the -f flag:

# zpool create rootpool c2d0s0               
invalid vdev specification
use '-f' to override the following errors:
/dev/dsk/c2d0s0 contains a ufs filesystem.

# zpool create -f rootpool c2d0s0

Then create the boot environment:

# lucreate -c snv_98 -n snv_102 -p rootpool
Checking GRUB menu...
System has findroot enabled GRUB
Analyzing system configuration.
Comparing source boot environment  file systems with the file 
system(s) you specified for the new boot environment. Determining which 
file systems should be in the new boot environment.
Updating boot environment description database on all BEs.
Updating system configuration files.
The device  is not a root device for any boot environment; cannot get BE ID.
Creating configuration for boot environment .
Source boot environment is .
Creating boot environment .
Creating file systems on boot environment .
Creating  file system for  in zone  on .
Populating file systems on boot environment .
Checking selection integrity.
Integrity check OK.
Populating contents of mount point .
Copying.
Creating shared file system mount points.
Creating compare databases for boot environment .
Creating compare database for file system .
Updating compare databases on boot environment .
Making boot environment  bootable.
Updating bootenv.rc on ABE .
File  propagation successful
Copied GRUB menu from PBE to ABE
No entry for BE  in GRUB menu
Population of boot environment  successful.
Creation of boot environment  successful.

Mount the iso for the upgrade and wait:
# lofiadm -a /export/home/ic140957/sol-nv-b102-x86-dvd.iso
/dev/lofi/1
# mount -r -F hsfs /dev/lofi/1 /mnt
# luupgrade -u -n snv_102 -s /mnt
System has findroot enabled GRUB
No entry for BE  in GRUB menu
Uncompressing miniroot
Copying failsafe kernel from media.
52155 blocks
miniroot filesystem is 
Mounting miniroot at 
Validating the contents of the media .
The media is a standard Solaris media.
The media contains an operating system upgrade image.
The media contains  version <11>.
Constructing upgrade profile to use.
Locating the operating system upgrade program.
Checking for existence of previously scheduled Live Upgrade requests.
Creating upgrade profile for BE .
Checking for GRUB menu on ABE .
Saving GRUB menu on ABE .
Checking for x86 boot partition on ABE.
Determining packages to install or upgrade for BE .
Performing the operating system upgrade of the BE .
CAUTION: Interrupting this process may leave the boot environment unstable 
or unbootable.
Upgrading Solaris: 100% completed
Installation of the packages from this media is complete.
Restoring GRUB menu on ABE .
Adding operating system patches to the BE .
The operating system patch installation is complete.
ABE boot partition backing deleted.
PBE GRUB has no capability information.
PBE GRUB has no versioning information.
ABE GRUB is newer than PBE GRUB. Updating GRUB.
GRUB update was successful.
Configuring failsafe for system.
Failsafe configuration is complete.
INFORMATION: The file  on boot 
environment  contains a log of the upgrade operation.
INFORMATION: The file  on boot 
environment  contains a log of cleanup operations required.
INFORMATION: Review the files listed above. Remember that all of the files 
are located on boot environment . Before you activate boot 
environment , determine if any additional system maintenance is 
required or if additional media of the software distribution must be 
installed.
The Solaris upgrade of the boot environment  is complete.
Installing failsafe
Failsafe install is complete.

# umount /mnt
# lofiadm -d /dev/lofi/1

# luactivate snv_102
# init 6 (reboot)

The new boot environment is now updated and can be booted. Hurrah!