c0t0d0s0.org

Am 26. Februar findet in Kiel wieder die alljährliche NetUSE Hausmesse NUBIT statt. Im Rahmen dieser Veranstaltung werde ich von 16:30 bis 18:30 einen Vortrag zum Thema "Solaris Secrets reloaded - noch mehr wenig bekannte Features von Solaris" halten.

One of the interesting features of Solaris x86 missing in the SPARC variant is the support for fast reboot. Fast reboot reduces the boot times, as it skips firmware and boot loader. The old kernel loads the new kernel and passed the control to the new one. With PSARC 2010/030 the SPARC variant of Solaris will get fast reboot, too.

Hier stand bis heute morgen die Ansprache, die ich für meine Oma geschrieben habe. Ich habe einige Mails bekommen, die das gut fanden, ich habe einige Mails bekommen, die das nicht so toll fanden. Da aus meiner Sicht der Blogeintrag die hinter der Veröffentlichung stehende Intention erfüllt hat, habe ich ihn nun entfernt. Dem Andenken an meine Oma ist Rechnung getragen. Der Teil des Vortrages, den ich veröffentlicht habe, war meine Beschäftigung mit dem Thema Tod, Erinnerungen, über das Vermissen. Der andere Teil war Privat, der in der Tat die Öffentlichkeit nichts angeht.

Ich möchte aber dies für eine Klarstellung nutzen: c0t0d0s0.org ist kein Technikblog.Es kommt vielen so vor, weil sie hier viele technische Dinge lesen. Dem ist aber nicht so. c0t0d0s0.org ist das Blog von Jörg Möllenkamp. Dieses Blog hat eigentlich kein Thema und ich behalte mir vor, ueber jedes Thema zu schreiben, das mir in den Sinn kommt. Wer das nicht lesen möchte, sei auf die Kategorien verwiesen, die dieses Blog thematisch untergliedern.

Ich habe mich irgendwann dafür entschieden eher weniger private Dinge hier zu schreiben, weil mich in meiner Nische einfach zuviele Menschen mittlerweile kennen. Ich bitte zu entschuldigen, das dennoch manche Ereignisse dennoch den bei mir so viele Emotionen hervorufen, die dazu führen, das ich dann doch den Weg ueber das Blog suche, um diesen Lauf zu lassen. Das kommt vielleicht ein oder zwei mal im Jahr vor. Letztes Jahr die Horrorwoche, dieses Jahr die Trauer.

Und ja: Ich bin ein Kind des Netzes. Mein erster Kontakt mit dem Internet war im Jahr 1992. Ich verwende es als natürlichen Teil meines Lebens.

While helping a colleague to answer some questions of a customer, i've was somewhat puzzled about the fact that there aren't many new SAP SD benchmark result IBM Power systems. There is just one result. It's a small p550 with 4 Power6 CPUs. But i forgot about that, because i had many other things to do.

Jan Brosowski wrote about an interesting speculation in his blog article "Es liegt vor allem an Solaris", which could explain this development.

His blog article is in german, thus i will summarize the interesting part here in english: There is a new rule in the SAP-SD benchmarking. When you have to separate the application server and the database server into two separate virtual machines (like using two LPARs) it isn't a 2-tier benchmark, it's a 3-tier benchmark. You could speculate, if IBM needs this separation to get all the horsepower of the large systems onto the street. Perhaps to have better control on used resources or just to improve the scalability of the system (perhaps you remember the TPC-H benchmark that used 32 IBM p570 nodes in a 32 system images configuration instead of a 8 system images configuration as you are able to connect 4 p570 nodes into a single system as an example of a strange benchmarking configuration that didn't used the scaling capabilities of a system). You could speculate if there's a scaling challenge in the IBM systems (in the HW or in the OS) when used with a single OS image. Such an challenge can be solved by using partitions. But with partitions activated, they couldn't submit a 2-tier SAP SD result.

Well ... from my point of view i get more and more cautious when IBM tries to extrapolate the big systems performance in benchmarks by using the results of smaller systems even when they introduce a scaling correction factor. I would really like to see a SAP SD 2-tier result of a p595 or at least a full-blown p570.

I really like to give presentations. Thus i'm looking at new devices from the perspective "Do they make my life easier in regard of giving presentations?". And somehow i believe the Apple iPad could be the ultimate presentation device on-the-road. More than enough storage for my presentations, there is an Keynote version on the device to make last-minute-changes with a display large enough to make changes, with a Dock2VGA cable you have 1024*756 (pretty much the standard for meeting room beamers) and it's lightweight. Would be nice to carry around just such a device instead of a full notebook. I want one

Brendan Gregg made some test runs to measure the impact of the new iSCSI implementation in the Sun Storage S7000 series and wrote about it in his article "iSCSI before and after". Just as an explanation: Early versions of the S7000 firmware used the usermode iSCSI target implementation. While usable it was somewhat slow compared. 2009.Q4 changed that by using the COMSTAR iSCSI target.

Brendan was able to measure the impact of this change. The old implementation yielded 311 MByte/s and 37056 512-byte IOPS. The new implementation yielded 2.70 GByte/s and 318.099 512-byte IOPS. Albeit some of the performance increases are due to the move from Quadcore to Hexacore Opterons, i think Brendan is right with his statement at the beginning of the article:

It would of course be better to split the results showing the COMSTAR and hardware update effects separately - but I only have the time to blog this right now (and I wouldn't be blogging anything without Joel's help to collect results.) I would guess that the hardware update is responsible for up to a 2x improvement, as it was for NFS. The rest is COMSTAR.

Just changed the disclaimer of my blog to reflect the fact, that i'm now working at Oracle, albeit i'm still an employee of the Sun Microsystems GmbH. Felt very strange. My plans at the moment for the blog: No changes. I will blog in the same way as i did before.

Just in case you hadn't the opportunity to view the webcast about the future directions of Sun inside of Oracle yesterday, you will find the recorded webcasts and the pdfs of the presentations on Oracles website now.

The Sun website is gone. It's just an redirect to http://www.oracle.com/index.html now. The content found its integration into the regular Oracle.com website. The national web sites (UK or Germany) are still online.

The start of this week wasn't easy for me. On Monday morning my maternal grandma lost her hard fight against a short, but extremely aggressive illness. At the end the science wasn't able to help her and all hopes and wishes couldn't turn her fate. It's really hard to see, that important people could be killed with such a short notice. We all hoped to have at least a few additional years with her, but we have to be thankful for all the years we got with her. At the end she got 82 and lived a long and good live. Godspeed Grandma ... where ever you are and wherever you go!

This is the end of Sun as an independent entity:

Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) announced today that it had completed its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Inc. Combination of the local entities worldwide will proceed in accordance with local laws.