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At the 25. April 2009 i will hold a presentation at the Linuxtage 2009 in Graz about Opensolaris. Despite its name it isn´t an event only about Linux, it´s an event round about opensource. You will find the programm at their website. My presentation is from 14:15 to 15:00 in the "Administrators" track.

Luggage is ready, my family doing vacation in my apartment in Hamburg is instructed about the strange usability of my washing machine and the alarm clock is set.

The next 14 days will be a little bit quiet in this blog. I´m away for a longer vacation. My next articles will be travel reports from California. But this time i won´t publish them at the end of vacation. I will try to write a little bit about my experiences in Califoria every few days.

Normal blogging will resume mid of April.

The second HHOSUG Meeting is over. And it was a success from my point of view. 37 (yeah, 37) people attended this HHOSUG meeting. Got some good feedback at the end of the event and the presentation of Julian and Lars was a good one.

But it took much longer. I stopped my ZFS presentation at 09:37 pm so this presentation has a cliffhanger. You will find the actual presentation of the evening here

And this time the pizza delivery didn´t tried to deliver the pizza to my home instead to the Sun office. One or two additional orders of this scale and they should award the platinum customer card

When you ask people about ZFS, they will tell you that one thing is really missing: User and Group Quotas. Well, Matthew Ahrens introducted the PSARC for it: 2009/204. At last ... the end of all questions for quotas is near ...

Do you remember my blog post about the vast difference between Opteron 8-socket from HP and Sun? Well ... history is repeating: There is an interesting difference between HP and Sun Nehalem system in the SAP SD benchmark, again.

According to the SAP SD benchmark certificate 2009005 the Sun Fire X4270 yields 20,300 SAPS at 3,700 users. The system was configured as following:

Sun Fire X4270, 2 processors / 8 cores / 16 threads,Intel Xeon Processor X5570, 2.93 GHz, 64 KB L1 cache and 256 KB L2 cache per core, 8 MB L3 cache per processor,48 GB main memory

The system used Solaris 10 as the OS and Oracle 10g as the database with SAP ERP 6.0, Enhancement Pack 4 (Unicode). The SAP SD benchmark certificate 2009004 discloses that a HP ProLiant DL380 G6 delivers 18030 SAPS at 3100 users.

HP ProLiant DL380 G6, 2 processors / 8 cores / 16 threads,Intel Xeon Processor X5570, 2.93 GHz, 64 KB L1 cache and 256 KB L2 cache per core, 8 MB L3 cache per processor, 48 GB main memory

The System used Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition as the OS and the RDBMS SQL Server 2008 with SAP ERP 6.0, Enhancement Pack 4 (Unicode).

So the benchmark yielded 12,5 percent more performance for the Sun configuration than for the HP configuration. What´s a good conclusion out of this benchmarks? It´s still problematic to compare the results, as the OS and the RDBMS are different. The SAP SD benchmark isn´t really database bound. I don´t think that the differences between the both systems are that huge, so it´s perhaps a good assumption, that Windows vs. Solaris is the main point leading to this difference. Iit would be really interesting to see a Linux result of the HP system

With the announcement of Intel Nehalem support in Solaris, we pointed to some interesting features, but from my perspective the power-aware dispatcher is the most interesting one. I wrote a while ago about the turbo boost feature of the Nehalem processors. The processor overclocks itself, when there is still head room in the power and thermal budget. It can overclock a core even higher, when other cores are in deep sleep. Otherwise it can make sense not to use a core for a single process, when there is enough compute power available otherwise you could put this core into a deep sleep mode just to save power. The new power-aware dispatcher in Solaris is aware of this side conditions and can dispatch the processes in a System accordingly. You will find more informations at the projects website.

You should save the date ... there will be an interesting announcement about new systems at that day

A really handy video for people on regular business travel. When you meet a possible significant other, it´s useful to declare your love



PS: A more extensive love song generator is available on the website of the artist. Especially important ... a version in Quenya, the language of the elves

So ... die Agenda fuer das 2. HHOSUG-Meeting am 31.3.2009 steht dann jetzt fest:

19:00		Organisatorisches Verkuerzung der Intervalle uebers Jahr Verlaengerung der Intervalle in der Urlaubszeit Offizielle Anmeldung als OSUG
19:15		Crash und Coredumps fuer Anfaenger (Joerg Moellenkamp)
19:45		pkgbuild (Julian Wiesner,Lars Timmann)
20:15		ZFS Internals (Joerg Moellenkamp, da Originalredner beruflich verhindert )

Die Zeiten sind Pi mal Daumen als Orientierung und nicht sklavisch gemeint. 21 Uhr ist Schluss. Zu Futtern gibt es wieder Pizza. Ich hoffe, das sie diesmal an die richtige Adresse geliefert wird

Hell ... this will be an expensive vacation: Apple stores selling iPhone 3G without a contract. At least the journey to the US is well timed ... By the way: Is there a halfway decently priced pre-paid data plan for mobiles available in the US?

Omnigraffle is one of my favourite tools. It´s one (if not the most important) reason, why i prefer to use MacOS X. People knowing Omnigraffle recognize at 10 miles distance, that most of my figures in my presentations were made with Omnigraffle.

The Omnigroup made an addition to their portfolio. I wasn´t aware of the program before, but i think it you will see the results of this new tool in my presentations, too: OmniGraphSketcher. It´s a tool with only one job, doing excellent looking graphs with a few mouse clicks.



Really fscking easy to create a graph ... the demo screencast is really worth a look and my own test took me fewer than 30 seconds. I´m impressed.



PS: The data in graph is nonsense ...