c0t0d0s0.org

I'm just back at the FH Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, the location of the FrOSCon 2009. Had some interesting conversations yesterday about ZFS, about Solaris, about Sun and sometimes questions about a certain other company. But as i had a really important meeting, which i wasn't allowed to miss at any cost in Bonn yesterday early evening, i left the location at 15:00pm. So ... the second starts in a few minutes ... i will write a longer report about the event on my trip back to Hamburg.

TUIfly hat es echt in Rekordgeschwindigkeit geschafft mich zu nerven. Auf der Bordkarte steht "Boarding 45 Minuten vorher" ... Natuerlich begann Boarding 20 Minuten vorher ... wie ueberall sonst auch. Halbe Stunde Schlaf umsonst geopfert ,,,

Oracle issued a press release about the upcoming merger of Sun and Oracle:

Oracle Corporation announced today that the U.S. Department of Justice has approved Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems and terminated the waiting period under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act.

Perhaps that's interesting for people needing a highly secure tape storage. As reported by eWeek the StorageTek T10000B tape drive got the FIPS 140-2 certification:

Nonetheless, Sun revealed Aug. 19 that it has become the first enterprise tape drive maker to be granted a prestigious federal security qualification: the FIPS 140-2 Certification at Security Level 2 for its Sun StorageTek T10000B tape drive.

The T10000B drive has the integrated capability to encrypt the data before writing it to the tape. Thus it contains components to do this encryption. The FIPS certification states that a hardware device complies to the standards set by the FIPS 140-2 document, which is headlined "Security Requirements for Cryptographic Modules". A level 2 FIPS certification means (copied from the Wikipedia article):

Security Level 2 improves upon the physical security mechanisms of a Security Level 1 cryptographic module by requiring features that show evidence of tampering, including tamper-evident coatings or seals that must be broken to attain physical access to the plaintext cryptographic keys and critical security parameters (CSPs) within the module, or pick-resistant locks on covers or doors to protect against unauthorized physical access.

Thus you can't get the key without leaving traces. BTW: I'm sure the messages in "Mission: Impossible" are FIPS140-2 Level 5 certified ... "This tape will self-destruct in five seconds"

The T10000B is the first tape-drive with this level of certification. If you are interested in this matter, the certification of the T10000B is available the nist.gov website. The FIPS140-12 document itself is available for download at NIST, too.

Infoworld's Paul Venezia reviewed two of our Intel Nehalem based systems. Namely he checked our X2270 and the X4270. This review titled with "Last of the red hot Sun servers" is a really postive one:

Both models are impressive entries into the Nehalem-based server market. Sun's x64-based hardware has been superlative for the past few years, and these new servers are the latest in a line of solid server platforms.[..]. Note to Oracle: Sun's hardware development is doing very well -- no need to make any changes.

About the X4270:

There's nearly nothing to dislike about this 2U server. [..]. This is a 2U server that drives like a 4U server.

About the X2270:

There's lots of power in this 1U package, [...]. The expansion options are limited to a single low-profile PCIe 2.0 slot, and the inclusion of only two gigabit Ethernet interfaces is somewhat disappointing, but for raw cost/performance, it's a very good deal.

Ab nächster Woche habe ich erstmal drei Wochen Urlaub. Allerdings steht dem noch was im Weg Ich bin Samstag und Sonntag auf der FrOSCON 2009, die am 22. und 23.08. in Sankt Augustin stattfindet. Samstag helfe ich am Sun-Stand, Sonntag halte ich zusätzlich einen Vortrag: Insights to Opensolaris. Dieser startet am Sonntag um 17:45 in Hörsaal 4 und dauert etwa eine Stunde.

ITpro published a review about the X4275 with " Sun Microsystems Sun Fire X4275 storage server review "

The X4275 puts forward a strong proposition as a storage server as it has a high potential capacity and plenty of room to expand.

Overall the review is positive, but i find some of the the nits they are picking a little bit strange like a missing graph for power consumption. Is such a graph on the iLOM really something you want, when you get the history on the console? I would process something like that centrally via Cacti or similar tools for a graphical representation.

Thanks to Stefan Hinker for this link: All the power calculators available at sun.com on a single page.

I'm using the Nokia N97 for a while now. The impression of the first day: The alarm clock is late (i set it on 06:00 am, it started off at 06:04 am), in conjunction with the facebook plugin, gravity and 4 mailboxes the battery consumption is horrendous, i have to reaload it every evening. But the QWERTZ-keyboard is cool.

Charles Suresh published some interesting findings in "Improving MySQL/Innodb/ZFS read-only performance by 5x using SSDs for L2ARC". In this case he tried a workload with low locality, where just 5% of the blocks where reread again (thus showing cache-busting behaviour). Instead of a pretty minimal performance improvement (as suggested by theory) Charles got an performance improvement by factor 5.

At end this workload was one of this corner cases defying standard tuning knowledge. Normally you would match database block size and storage block size to get optimal performance. But this would hurt performance in this special case because the prefetching of ZFS wouldn't help as less data is cached. Cached? Yes, cached! ZFS doesn't cache just the mysql block you've used in this situation. That wouldn't be sensible. When you already have the data, you can cache them. Let's assume you have a 128 KByte blocksize and the 16 KByte blocksize. So you've read 8 blocks mysql-blocks with one ZFS block. Even in a cache defying workload there is a certain propability that even when you don't use block x again, you will use block x+1 to x+7 while it's in the cache. And this prefetch by mismatching blocksizes is largely responsible for the performance boost, where you didn't expected one. But: Without the mismatching blocksize you wouldn't have read this data into the cache, thus the system would have to go to the disk, thus resulting in lower performance.

Obviously the same effect is true for the normal ARC but as the ARC is normally much smaller than the L2ARC you have a high propability that the prefetched but unused mysql blocks are already evicted from the cache, when you need them. The larger cache provided the SSD reduces the propability that the data gets evicted from (L2)ARC before your workload uses the prefetched blocks.

A few days ago there were a raging discussion in my blog with a reader about the future of storage. The discussion ignited about my text about the waning importance of storage array controllers.. I'm argued that we will see different storage concepts in the future, whereas the reader was pretty sure, that the storage controllers will play the same role in the future than today and that's just Sun who thinks differently (at least that was my understanding of his comments)

Yesterday i found the following article of the Storageractice of Sun Taiwan: They cite in 你還需要儲存區域網路嗎 a study of Forrester about the future of storage. My colleagues in Taiwan posted a single slide of this document. And the slide is really interesting, as it supports some of my arguments in regard of the future development of storage.