News of the last few days

Due to my illness i wasn´t really able to blog about several important news of the last few days. So i will summarize them in this article.

At first we announced the availability of flash disks for our x86 and CMT servers. I was talking about this step with customers for a while now, but it took a little bit longer than i thought initially. It´s more work than just putting a bracket at a SSD to put them into servers ... at least when you do it right. You have to check serveral things: For example ... how many parallel capacitor loads can your power supply deliver. SSD have DRAM, DRAM is volatile, you need power to ensure data consistency, most companies use capacitors for this tasks, but they have to be loaded at system startup ... no problem with 1 ... but you should check this with a system with 16 drive slots ... there is always someone who tries to max out a system with something ... but that shouldn´t be a customer.

Another interesting announcement was the Sun Open Flash Module. This is a SODIMM sized module (no ... you can´t plug it into the memory slot of your notebook, the module is keyed differently). It´s a very small module with 24 GB usable capacity of flash, 64 MB of dram and a flash controller. There are several very interesting products in the pipe using this modules, but that´s stuff for another anouncement.

BigAdmin pointed to an interesting tech tip: How to fake a different Solaris version into the uname. The nice thing about Solaris ... there is binary compatibility. The bad thing about some developers: They ensure, that their software doesn´t run on newer software versions by checking the OS version. The tip looks like a good way to run software, when the source code of an application isn´t available and you have to ask the developer for help with a shovel.

And then there was Rock ... or the announcement made by John Fowler, that we will see Rock based systems in Fall 2009. You will find a report about our new processor at PCworld.com

Apropos Rock ... Ben Rockwood will hold an one hour version of his fabulous "ZFS in the Trenches" presentation at the Community One East. When you are lucky enough to attend the Community One, you shouldn´t miss it. His version at the OpenSolaris Storage Summit was great. I hope there will be an video stream of the presentation as well.