c0t0d0s0.org

Peter Galvin publishes an column in the ;login: magazine - a publication of the USENIX and often an really insightful read. This time he wrote about the Storage Analytics part of our new storage appliances - Galvin.info: My latest column at ;login:

Overall, the use of the analytics component of the Sun Storage 7000 NAS appliance is amazing, allowing exploration of every aspect of the performance, load, and status of the system. [...] On the whole I’m glad to leave behind the Middle Ages of performance analysis and look forward to the new tools of the modern age

The certification of an evaluation of an evaluation target is only valid for a certain security target in conjunction with a certain evaluation target. Thus when you update your evaluation target, the certification isn´t valid for your updated product. Thus you have to re-evaluate the new version (this takes a really long time) or you have to check if the changes would lead to a different result in the evaluation than with the the original target of evaluation. (for example for Solaris 10 11/06).

For Solaris 10 05/08 Sun choosed the second way, thus Sun renewed the EAL 4+ certification for Solaris 10. So the evaluation Solaris 10 05/08 is now certified as well to conform with the EAL 4+:

All changes to the TOE were bug fixes. Through functional and regression testing of Solaris 10 Release 05/08 assurance gained in the original TOE certification was maintained. As all of the changes to the TOE have been classified as minor, it is the conclusion of the CB that the maintained TOE is appropriate for assurance continuity and reevaluation is not required.

Storage Analytics in the Sun Storage 7000 series is a great tool to monitor performance and to search for optimizations in your storage configuration (making your job easier). But this is only the customer side of the medal. There is a second one - albeit not so interesting for most people: It´s much easier to visualize the effects of certain developments in ZFS in presales and in blogs (making my job easier). Instead of showing boring numbers, you can show a nice chart to make you point clear. Brendans screenshots will definitely make it into my S7000 presentation (i don´t use the company ones as my presentation style is pretty much different to the official one)

Brendan used the possibilities of Storage Analytics to write a really great article about the L2ARC discussing the effects to performance (really fsking great), the price you have to pay for it (you have to warm the caches) and the impact on designing storage architecture with focus on performance (forget mirroring, hello wide striping - not for all workloads, but for many ... and you have to pay the price mentioned before). And obviously: It shows to you the strength of Storage Analytics to dig down into performance data. So ... i strongly suggest, that you read Brendans new article about L2ARC in his blog. It´s worth a read and as L2ARC is available for OpenSolaris as well you can transfer the informations to that operating environment as well.

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.

Was soll man von einem Tag halten, den man mit einem Lied, das unter anderem diese Textzeilen enthält, in Dauerrotation beginnt:

Es blendet uns zu sehen und schmerzt uns, Dir zu Lauschen
Doch scheint es so, als wuerd es hier nichts geben mehr als Rauschen
Schliess die Augen sanft, mein Kind und bleib in meinen Armen
Ich trage Dich hinweg durch diese alte Welt

Au weia ....

This article of Matt Assay is a nice answer to all this RedHat versus Sun talk of the recent time because of similar market capitalisation:

Perhaps Sun Microsystems' valuation of MySQL wasn't too far off. Sun acquired the open-source database leader in January 2008 for a whopping $1 billion, a sum that many rational people thought was way too high. Perhaps they were wrong; $1 billion is beginning to look like a bargain. [...] That is phenomenal growth, and it puts MySQL on a fast track to catch up and perhaps surpass Red Hat, in terms of sales.

The article is a really interesting read.

There are several people thinking that the search for future data center fabric technology is already decided for Ethernet. I don´t think so. I still think of Infiniband as a quite capable contender in this discussion. 40 GB/s Infiniband is already available whereas 40 GBit/s Ethernet is still in discussion. With the current surge of virtualization the datacenter is in need of faster protocols with lower latency right now connecting lots of servers to build a compute fabric ... today, not in 2010. Thus the enterprise datacenter of tommorow isn´t much different to the HPC datacenter of today and HPC is a stronghold of Infiniband.

The Canadian provider iWeb writes in his blog:

iWeb just acquired the Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System to fulfill its needs in large volume storage. To be specific, it will be used to support the email system in shared hosting, instead of the previous data servers NetApp F740 and F820.

Nice to see the first companies to announce their acquisition of Sun Storage 7000 series systems.

I tend to say it on a regular schedule in this blog, i say it to my colleagues and everybody who ask me: "Rock is alive and is doing well". But just in case you don´t believe me ... Jonathan said the same on an analyst conference yesterday. TPM wrote about this at TheRegister - Sun will Rock in 2009:

"I think we've said to plan on it for later this year, and we are still on track," Schwartz said.

Hey, the signs for upcoming Rock based systems are as large as the Alps . Okay, when you know where you have to look, for example in the caselog for OpenSolaris. I´ve hold back this link for some weeks now, but now someone has already published it in the Register comment section... so i assume it´s save to publish it here (I´m still not an official leak ). ARC 2008/761 is a really interesting link:

4.1.1. Supernova platform names

Supernova platforms will have the following root node "name" and
"banner-name" properties.

"name"
Type: Prop-encoded-string
Contents: Root node name property for Supernova platforms
Values:
Value: "SUNW,SPARC-Enterprise-AT7480" for Silver-II
Value" "SUNW,SPARC-Enterprise-AT7880" for Platinum-II

"banner-name"
Type: Prop-encoded-string
Contents: Banner name for Supernova platforms
Values:
Value: "SPARC Enterprise AT7480" for Silver-II
Value: "SPARC Enterprise AT7880" for Platinum-II


This was the stuff i´ve talked about when someone asked me about Rock in the comments section and i´ve said "It´s doing, well but i can´t talk about it". There are several other ARC cases pointing to Rock-based systems ... but hey ... search on your own ... may be you will find other interesting features on the course But don´t hold your breath .... you can´t order the systems now.

PS: This is one of the cases where you think "Why do you need NDAs when your fellow colleagues in development write parts of the NDA stuff in their ARC cases and in their code?" I´m glad they didn´t more specific stuff about the systems But i assume, you have to live with it, when your operating system is open-source.

Sun issued an Security Altert for Solaris 10: A Security Vulnerability in Solaris IPv6 Implementation (ip6(7p)) May Cause a System Panic:

An insufficient validation security vulnerability in the Solaris IPv6 implementation (ip6(7p)) may allow a remote privileged user to panic the system using a crafted packet. This is a type of Denial of Service (DoS).

A workaround and an Interim Security Relief patch are available. There are two possible workarounds: Switching off IPv6 by ifconfig -a6 down or inserting block in quick all with short in your IPFilter configuration.

Wohl nicht ... aber es klingt schon widersinnig, was wie sich das Gesetz zur neuen KFZ-Steuer liest. Denn die Abgasnorm wird demgemäss steuerlich nicht mehr berücksichtigt. Momentan werden Autos mit Kat dadurch gefördert, das die Einhaltung einer bestimmten Abgasnorm in die Bemessung der Steuer Eingang findet.. Das würde bei der auschliesslichen Berücksichtung des CO₂-Ausstosses wegfallen.

Ein Kollege hat mich allerdings darauf hingewiesen, das seit 1993 nur noch Fahrzeuge mit Katalysator zugelassen werden. Insofern werden deswegen jetzt nicht die Katalysatoren rausgeworfen. Zudem gilt, das Neufahrzeuge bestimmte Abgasnormen eingehalten werden müssen, momentan Euro-4. Sicherlich kein gutes Signal, aber auch nich so bloed, wie ich initial dachte .... man muss hier wohl mehrere Normen und Gesetze in ihrer Gesamtheit sehen. Das wirklich unschöne ist, das dadurch das bei Einhaltung von Euro-4 jetzt eigentlich eher einen Anreiz zur Reduzierung des CO2-Ausstosses gibt, denn zur weiteren Reduzierung anderer Schadstoffe.