c0t0d0s0.org

I mentioned the update of the 7410 hardware in a blog entry yesterday afternoon. Brendan wrote an interesting blog entry about the performance impact with "7410 hardware update, and analyzing the HyperTransport". For cached workloads (to get the disks out of the equation), the increase of performance is really impressive:

Workload	7410 (Barcelona)	7410 (Istanbul)	Improvement
NFSv3 streaming cached read	2.15 Gbytes/sec	2.68 Gbytes/sec	25%
NFSv3 8k read ops/sec	127,143	223,969	75%

What many people forget when talking about Istanbul, is the fact that it didn't get just two additional cores. You get HT3 and HT Assist (a snoop filter to reduce bus contention by processors searching their data in other processors caches) with it. Brendan summarized his findings with:

For this 7410 upgrade, the extra CPU cores help - but it's more about the upgrade to the HyperTransport. HT3 provides 3x the CPU interconnect bandwidth, and dramatically improves the delivered performance of the 7410: from 25% to 75%.

The Sun Storage 7410 got a little update. You can get it with up to four six-core CPUs, thus up to 24 cores in total.

Sometimes you stumble over interesting upcoming products already documented in docs.sun.com: Click on Storage, then at the "Browse Product Documentation" at Hardware (if it's not already opened), then click on Disk storage. Now open the Solid State Storage part of the tree. And hopefully you will find the documentation of a really interesting device.

I got aware of a new rumour in regard of Oracle and Sun: This rumour is based on a CNN article, which speculated that Oracle will sell of the hardware business of Sun to HP. I just dismissed it as a large heap speculation. They have to speculate as the media doesn't have any insight knowledge and i didn't wanted to write about it. Okay, but now there is an additional twist in the story. I joked about it a few days ago that this will provoke exactly this reaction from the tin foil hat department.

The Sun+Oracle is faster web page was available under the URL http://www.oracle.com/features/hp/sunoraclefaster.html, later it moved to http://www.oracle.com/features/sunoraclefaster.html. I assume, you know what people thought now? Yes ... the /hp/ part in the URL is a sure sign that the rumour at CNN is true. Really, some people think that and i've heard, there are some people at competitors, who fuel this thoughts.

Folks, could you please do at least a little bit of fact checking? Let's look at the Oracle website. http://www.oracle.com/features/hp/middleware-strategy.html">
http://www.oracle.com/features/hp/middleware-strategy.html ... ehh ... no HP here, http://www.oracle.com/features/hp/oracle-database-11g.html ... sorry ... it's about 11g, not something in relation to HP. Oh, http://www.oracle.com/features/hp/innovation-on-demand-crm.html ... nope ... no luck ... no HP in there. Okay, people with the nice silver hats ... it may be possible that /hp/ may stand for something like home page, high performance, hillarious projections or even horse poo. Okay, home page looks like the most probable explanation as those stories were homepage features. And vice versa: http://www.oracle.com/openworld/2008/hp.html, that's an article about HP at the Openworld, no /hp/ in this URL. Or this piece about the Exadata Storage Server at http://www.oracle.com/profit/features/exadata.html. Heck ... no /hp/ in this url, too.

Okay, okay ... i know what comes next: Oracle felt catched in their intentions about Sun HW business and renamed the page out of this reason. Folks, entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. Perhaps there is the remote possibility there was someone at Oracle who thought that putting Sun, Oracle an the to letters h and p in the same line isn't such an intelligent move, when you want to brag about the performance of Sun equipment. And perhaps someone at Oracle thought, it isn't a good idea to have this URL, when you don't want to fuel any rumours from outsiders or FUD from competitors, especially in the light of such blatant speculation pieces like the CNN article, which was published a day earlier.

And to close this article: There are dozens of reasons why the CNN article is just unfounded speculation, but i just want to hint to a single line. Oracle wrote in the announcement for the TPC-C result publication on October 14th:" Check back on October 14 as we demonstrate Oracle's commitment to Sun hardware and Sun SPARC.". Enough said.

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.

I found an interesting text this morning. In "SSDs, pNFS Will Test RAID Controller Design" Henry Newman speculates about the future of RAID controller and the difficulties their vendors will have in the light of the advent of SSD. My opinion is somehow divided: Yes, RAID controller vendors will have a difficult time in the future. But: No, this won't be the fault of SSD.

Interestingly the storage market behaves in waves (like many other markets). The pendulum moves between RAID-Controller and JBOD for years now, at the moment the pendulum moves to JBOD, it was on the RAID-Controller side fore many years, albeit the next few years may destroy the pendulum, as the shortfalls get more and more visible and other technologies are available.

The most imminent thread to dedicated RAID controller has it's foundation in the past: Hardware RAID was invented many years ago, when the main CPUs hadn't a large amount of power to compute the necessary calculations for RAID5 for example. So it was obvious to offload all these calculations into an external device, the RAID-Controller was born.

But this method isn't without shortfalls like the read-modify-write cycle when you modify a stripe or the point that a HW raid controller gives some protection, but just in case you have to recover. On the other hand that HW raid controller hides the redundancies for more intelligent mechanisms: For example when you use HW RAID you just see one copy with one checksum from the more intelligent mechanism. The system can detect the error, but has no redundancy to correct it. A more intelligent mechanism may use the redundancies of RAID to correct the data, even when it was corrupted on wire. A more intelligent mechanism than a HW raid controller may be aware of the placement of data on the disk and doesn't have to put millions of zeros or useless already deleted data in sync. One of those more intelligent mechanisms would be ZFS, but I'm sure that the future will bring us other, similar technologies as other operating environments have pretty much the same problems with their storage.

I really think, that all storage will look really similar to the S7000 in the future. When we talk about increasing requirements to the storage systems by new storage media we get to a point where some embedded CPU aren't enough and we end with systems that look really similar to an x86 server. Maybe they will be better hidden than at our S7000 series, but it will be similar. And when we already are at this point, many storage companies will come to the conclusion that it may be a good choice to trow away their operating system they've used in the past and use something already available, a Linux, a BSD or, well, an OpenSolaris.

But then we get to a more important point: The people using this component could get to the idea, that storage arrays like we now them today with their centralized storage controller could be just a bottleneck. And when all this storage-stuff is done be general-purpose OS on general-purpose hardware you could come to the conclusion, that your servers could do the job as well and get rid of some of the shortfalls I've described above. To explain that dedicated storage controllers have still some advantages will be a tough job for the vendors of such components.

For a long time data services like replication were one of the advantages, but many of them are already available with OpenSolaris for example: You can already do replication (synchronous with the help of AVS and asynchronous natively) with ZFS, you can do compression, you can thin-provision, you will be able to do encryption and deduplication, you can do all this file-level and block level sharing protocols. So even the resort of having more data services is just a short-lived, almost non-existent last resort.

pNFS is the next new technology, that may be problematic for the future of dedicated storage controllers. Distributed in nature, there doesn't seem to be a niche for this controllers. There are just large amount of servers with a modest amount of hard disks per server but again ... just as a JBOD.

So, i've just explained, why dedicated storage controllers may be lose their drive(s), but why isn't it the fault of SSD as I wrote in the beginning. The reason lies in the nature of SSD: You simply put SSD not behind RAID controllers. You keep the distance between the CPU and the SSD as short as possible. Period. Any given local area storage network introduces latency. The higher the number of I/O operations per second, the more harmful is any additional latency. There is only one exception: In case of a cluster, you have to put everything you need to fail over a consistent version of your data to the surviving node in the local area storage network to enable a fail over. And when you don't put the SDD behind the RAID controllers, they can't be the bottleneck.

ZFS offers a technology called Hybrid Storage Pool (I'm pretty sure that we will see similar technologies in Linux and Windows at a point in the future) and with technology you don't have the need to put SSD behind a controller. It's in front of the controller and reduces the load to the controller. Many people still think about SSD as a substitute they hard disk, but we have to thing different, we can think different with HSP.

So: Yes, RAID controller are really a technology that may be of waning importance, but the reasons are different.

Ich hatte ja schon vor einigen Tagen angekündigt, das es bald wieder ein neues Webseminar von mir geben wird: Ich werde in diesem Seminar auf die ganzen Sicherheitsfeatures in Solaris eingehen. Also wie gehe ich mit Least Privileges um, was hat es mit den signed Binaries auf sich, was bedeutet eigentlich EAL und Common Criteria, wie können mir die Trusted Extensions weiterhelfen, was ist die Solaris Fingerprint Database und vieles mehr. Stattfinden wird dieses Webseminar Seminar am 30 September 2009 von 14:00 bis 15:00 Uhr. Für dieses kann man sich nunmehr auch anmelden. Das Anmeldeformular findet Ihr hier.

Bei dieser Gelegenheit möchte ich gleich noch auf drei weitere Webseminare hinweisen: Am 26. August wird Volker Wetter (Technical Architect Systems Pratice) zum Thema "10 Gründe, Ihre Applikation auf Solaris zu betreiben" sprechen. Für den 16. September ist dann ein Vortrag zum Thema "Sun Unified Storage in der Praxis" geplant. Dieser wird von Karlheinz Vogel, seines Zeichens Senior Storage Consultant vorgetragen. Der Holodoc, sorry ... Dr. Stefan Schneider, Chief Technologist, wird sich dann am 22. September mit dem Thema "Start smart. Scale hard! Warum Web-Startups mit Ihrer IT skalieren müssen" befassen. Weitere Informationen findet Ihr dazu auf der Webseite der deutschen Sun Webseminare.

PS: Entschuldigt bitte den Text bei der Beschreibung meines Seminars. Is vom Produktmarketing. Der Vortrag ist marketingfrei

I don´t know, if Chris Mellor was invited to a presentation of the S7000 storage series or what he did there (if he was invited) besides of drinking coffee, eating cookies and living in it´s own reality. Anyway ... if you need another reason to put him on the large heap of journalists of questionable quality, you should read his last article:

The Sun 7000 business model, with its commodity hardware aspects, is good news in Oracle-land, but its open source software is not. Not to Oracle, any way. Neither is the bag-of-bits aspect of the 7000's software environment particularly attractive to many customers. Here are the software lego blocks; now build the storage array hardware and software system yourself. No thank you. I want to have an easier time implementing my storage array.

Chris, the last time i´ve looked at the S7000 series, it was a appliance you order completely integrated with storage, software and server. Just like your beloved NetApp, Chris. Those systems are nothing much more than than storage, servers and software ...

There was a time, when an negative article at the Register could be an nail to the coffin of a product, now many articles are nails to the coffin of the Registers reputation.

ZFS has transparent compression from the beginning, thus the Sun Storage 7000 has it as well. Dave Pacheco gives some insight into the performance characteristics of zfs compression in the 7000 series:

The performance effects vary based on the workload and compression algorithm, but powerful CPUs allow compression to be used even on top of serious loads. Moreover, the appliance provides great visibility into overall system performance and effectiveness of compression, allowing administrators to see whether compression is helping or hurting their workload.

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.

A while ago, the Storage Anarchist wrote a text about the usage of flash in various vendor strategies. I didn´t knew at first, what i should write about this, and well ... Adam Leventhals blog-post was a first well-tempered reply. But i want to put some additional perspective to this article.

Guter Artikel hinsichtlich der Weiterentwicklung von Storage:Commentary about IP Storage Directions

Information Storage Security Journal - Sun SAN Solution charts "A New Way
Ein Interview mit Whitfield Diffie zum Thema Infrastruktursicherheit: Diffie: Infrastructure a disaster in the making. Sehr interessant.