System News for Sun Users - The Blog

Spend 60 minutes listening to  Russ Castronovo, (Director, Social and New Media, Sun Microsystems), interviewing Michael Cornwell, Sun manager of flash memory technology. Learn how Sun will leverage this new, disruptive technology to create a new storage architecture.

Michael joined Sun from Apple where he was involved with disk subsystems and innovatve flash based products such as the iPods.

This was a live event and Russ asks questions  submitted from the audience. 

Blogtalkradio.com will be hosting another edition of Sun’s Innovation Insider, this time featuring Michael Cornwell, Sun manager of flash memory technology business development, who will discuss flash memory and storage technologies, and answer questions from listeners.

The show will air Thursday, June 26, from 12 noon - 1 p.m. PST

Visit http://www.blogtalkradio.com/stations/sunradio/innovationinsider. The dial-in number for questions during the live broadcast is: (646) 478-3261.

If you would like to submit a question for consideration in advance of the program, please send to innovationinsider@sun.com by Wednesday, June 25.

Podcasts will be posted at the following link after every show: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/stations/sunradio/featured.aspx.

New Sun Internet Talk Show: “Shift Radio”

Gamers may be interested in tuning in to a new Sun radio show called “Shift Radio” that will feature discussions with leaders in the gaming and rich media industries as well as the latest in tech gadgets. Sun Chief Gaming Officer Chris Melissinos will host the weekly show which will be debuting this Friday, June 27, at 9 a.m. PST with guest Hal Halpin, President of the Entertainment Consumers Association.

Visit http://www.blogtalkradio.com/shiftradio. The dial-in number for questions during the live broadcast: (347) 539-5008

Questions can be submitted in advance by sending an email to shiftradio@sun.com no later than Thursday, June 26.

Podcasts will be posted after every show at the same Sun radio station link listed above.

If you’re interested in learning more about COMSTAR, the OpenSolaris Project COmmon Multiprotocol SCSI TARget, then take 10 minutes of your time to watch a screencast demonstration conducted by Sun expert Sumit Gupta who walks viewers through the basic steps of setting up a Solaris host as a fibre channel storage array using COMSTAR and ZFS.

The OpenSolaris Web site also has a video of Gupta presenting COMSTAR at SNIA SDC and Sun engineers presenting COMSTAR at SNW.

Visit the COMSTAR Videos page for all three.

The International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) 2008 is currently underway in Dresden, Germany. Numerous announcements from Sun have been made including:

• the new Sun Blade X6450 Server Module powered by four high-performance dual-or-quad core Intel Xeon processor 7300 series. When integrated into the Sun Constellation System, this new Sun Blade x64 system delivers more than seven TFlops of peak performance per fully populated Sun Blade 6048 chassis, up to 71% more compute cores and 50% more memory capacity than competing blade servers.

• additions to the Sun Constellation System, such as the Sun Datacenter Switch 3×24 (a smaller version of the Sun Datacenter Switch 3456), which features 72 DDR 4X Infiniband ports

Video presentations from the conference and other broadcast media on Sun’s newest HPC solutions are posted on the Sun HPC Community Portal so readers can find out about the latest information as its announced.

Also, visit the ISC 2008 Media Kit Web page hosted on Sun’s site for more detailed information on the company’s newest HPC products and solutions.

Find out how to optimize OpenSolaris on Intel Xeon processors in a video clip series hosted by Software Engineering Manager David Stewart, who is part of the Open Source Technology Center at Intel.

So far, Stewart has three video clips posted on YouTube, each of which run a little over five minutes:

Episode 1: “Why Intel and OpenSolaris?”

Episode 2: “Power Utilization”

Episode 3: “Getting Instant Performance Boosts”

OpenSolaris Build 90 allows multiple products, protocols and device types to be supported by any Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS)-based server with a common framework - COMSTAR or the COmmon Multiprotocol SCSI TARget.

This OpenSolaris project provides a software framework enabling any OpenSolaris host to be turned into a SCSI target storage device, which can be accessed over the network by initiator hosts. With COMSTAR, a SCSI target subsystem is broken down into independent functional modules that are then integrated by the SCSI Target Mode Framework (STMF).

COMSTAR’s framework allows for all SCSI device types (tape, disk, SES, etc.) connected to any transport (Fibre Channel, iSCSI, iSER, SAS, FCoE, etc.) with concurrent access to all LUNs (Logical Unit Numbers) and a single point of management.

“A key objective of COMSTAR is to provide a simple framework for users to add transport protocols and device types to build new block storage devices,” blogs Sun’s Scott Tracy. “This allows any block storage device to be built from one common framework. No other commercially available operating system allows this type of flexibility or coordination.”

During this past May’s CommunityOne gathering, Sun Engineering Manager Peter Buckingham gave a presentation on COMSTAR that includes instructions on creating a multiprotocol server using ZFS to create a file share, installing COMSTAR and using COMSTAR to create a FC target. Visit the Storage Stop blog to view the video.

A new Internet radio program from Sun called “Innovation Insider” will be featuring discussions with industry innovators on a variety of topics. This coming Friday, June 13th, Sun Chief Gaming Officer Chris Melissinos will be talking about current trends in PC gaming and answer questions from listeners during the show hosted on blogtalkradio.com.

Tune in between 10-11 a.m. PDT and go to http://www.blogtalkradio.com/stations/sunradio/innovationinsider to listen to the live broadcast. To pose a question to Melissinos during the broadcast, dial (646) 478-3261. Or, if you would like to submit a question for consideration in advance of the program, please send it to innovationinsider@sun.com by Thursday, June 12.

Podcasts will be available after every show, just visit: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/stations/sunradio/featured.aspx

Jeff Cheeney, community manager for OpenSolaris Storage, discusses Sun’s new open storage initiative with Amit Vashi, Qlogic vice president, and his company’s role in OpenSolaris Storage Community from a vendor’s perspective.

This podcast is part of an ongoing series. Any suggestions for future guests are welcomed.

Sun Senior Director of Open Storage and Networking Graham Lovell discusses the company’s intent to offer solid state, flash technology storage devices for enterprises in an interview on Sun News. Recorded June 4th, the piece runs 15 minutes.

Listen now.

Chris Wood, CTO Storage Solutions Group, Sun, talks with Sun Distinguished Engineer Harriet Covertson, who invented SAM & QFS, about the future of intelligent storage, namely object-based storage.

Object-based storage addresses the market’s need to store increasingly massive numbers of storage objects with scaling and performance capabilities, while also preserving customers’ investments.

In an eight-minute YouTube video, Covertson explains how object-based storage works. In short, she says the filesystem that processes the storage or maps the storage under its management inside the filesystem is being relocated to intelligent storage devices, which can manage and map their own data. The storage devices actually understand the data they are keeping. So when an object arrives, the device can actually allocate or map the object onto its storage. This opens up the possibility for the storage device to “do read-ahead, if we are accessing the object sequentially, it can do caching, if we’re doing random. So there is all kind of possibilities for mix access that we never had before,” Covertson says.

Object-based storage also offers great scale since allocation is being removed from the metadata server to individual intelligent storage devices, which can be done in parallel. This means with 20 storage devices, there are 20 allocators.

Although object-based storage does not require any changes be made to applications and filesystems will be able to run exactly as they do now, Covertson did note that additional features are being added such as storing attributes, searching capability, mining on the storage device - “all possibilities open up with object-based storage,” she adds.

“This is really revolutionary and I believe this is where filesystems are moving,” Covertson says. “It is totally changing the paradigm of filesystems, and it is really exciting to be apart of this and Sun be apart of this.”

Take a listen.