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. 

Sun has approved Active Power, Inc.’s PowerHouse system as a complimentary solution to the Sun Modular Datacenter S20. Active Power provides efficient, reliable and green critical power solutions and uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems to enable business continuity in the event of power disturbances.

Its Powerhouse system is based upon the company’s flywheel-based UPS system and offers a standby generator, chiller and switchgear. It is ideal for containerization due to its rugged design and ability to operate in wide ambient temperature ranges (0 to 40 degrees Celsius). The company claims PowerHouse can save customers up to 45 percent in total cost of ownership due to its high-efficiency and pre-packaged system design.

“Energy consumption and facility space continue to be pain points for data center operators,” said Michael Markides, analyst at IMS Research. “The challenge lies in how to help organizations reduce their energy consumption with green products that don’t consume a lot of space, but that also carry low capital and operating expenses. Green solutions that can offer these attributes along with scalability will continue to be sought after from end users, particularly from those organizations that are building new data centers.”

More information about Active Power’s PowerHouse system and its compatibility with the Sun Modular Datacenter can be found at http://www.activepower.com/solutions/powerhouse/.

Network.com, Sun’s collection of grid-enabled online applications available on a pay-per-use basis, along with the free open source 3D content creation suite Blender were selected by BBC World News as one of the best cloud applications available:

“Sun’s data centres are available for hire by the hour to power on-demand cloud services. Used mainly for processing scientific data, the servers can also be used for rendering animations via the open source Blender 3D software on the desktop.”

Network.com and Blender 3D recently made headlines as the technologies teamed up for the 3D animated movie “Big Buck Bunny.” Network.com acted as a web hosting location for the online comedy created using Blender 3D.

In a Sun BigAdmin community-submitted tech tip by Victor Feng, readers are treated to some helpful hints they may need when setting up resource control for Zones in the Solaris 10 08/07, which was the first version that offered this control directly to users.

Tips passed along by Feng:

- Use cpu-shares to control zone computing resources.

- The swap property of capped-memory is virtual swap space, not physical swap space.

- A zone sometimes consumes more physical memory than the maximum limit.

For each of the above mentioned hints, Feng provides information and coding to make these aspects of zones work more effectively.

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.

Sun now holds the number four spot on the Top 500 Supercomputers list with its Sun Constellation System-powered supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), which boasts a compute capacity of 326 TFlops and a peak performance of 504 TFlops.

The Ranger supercomputer at TACC is based on the Sun Constellation System which combines the Sun Blade 6048 Modular System and the Sun Datacenter Switch 3456.

“Working with TACC, we’ve delivered the highest ranking system built on an open architecture and open platforms and made it possible for customers the world over to take advantage of the power of superscale technologies in their own departments,” said John Fowler, executive vice president, Sun Systems. “With Sun’s Constellation System, customers don’t have to dream about a supercomputing Ferrari, they can drive their own.”

Sun HPC software and storage also made the list with Sun’s Lustre file system managing data on six of the list’s top 10 sites as well as nearly half of the top 50 supercomputers. Additionally, half of the list’s top 10 sites and nearly half of the top 50 systems archive their data on Sun storage.

Solaris Containers or Zones are lightweight virtual Solaris instances similar to a full Solaris OS instance but which share a single Solaris kernel. They are easy to provision, require only a small amount of incremental disk space, and can be rebooted as needed in seconds. Containers can also be cloned, detached, moved and reattached. In a blog by Michael O’Connor, he shares the advantages of combining multiple applications onto a single server using lightweight Solaris Containers versus hypervisors.

In a follow-up entry, he explains that in some rare cases, applications are unable to run in a local or non-global zone and should go through a qualification process to identify potential installation or runtime issues, especially if root permission is needed to install or run the application.

“Local zones operate with a reduced set of process privileges relative to the global zone. As a result, all processes running in a non-global zone also have reduced privilege and certain system calls may return errors,” O’Connor writes. “Again, 99% of applications will run just fine in non-global zones but it pays to take the time to fully qualify new or migrating services before attempting a production deployment.”

Resources for ISVs and system administrators interested in taking a more cautious entry into Solaris Zones:

• Bringing your Application into the Zone
• Qualification Best Practices for Application Support in Non-Global Zones
• System Administration Guide: Solaris Containers-Resource Management and Solaris Zones
• Zones and Containers FAQ at OpenSolaris.org
• Virtualization Blueprints at wikis.sun.com

Sun will be incorporating Symantec’s storage virtualization software into some of its products to advance archiving and e-discovery capabilities, announced Symantec Chairman and CEO John Thompson during the Symantec Vision 08 conference being held in Las Vegas this week.

“Sun will be using our storage virtualization software for energy conservation, archiving and e-discovery purposes,” Thompson said, reported Chris Preimesberger with eWeek. “This should all be finalized this fall.”

Cool Stack Version 1.3 is now available for download and offers multiple component upgrades as well as the following new additions:

- Python 2.5.2
- nginx 0.6.31
- libxslt 1.1.22
- fontconfig 2.4.2
- mod_security apache 2.5.3
- mod_python 3.3.1
- mod_ruby 1.2.6
- mod_dtrace 0.3a
- memcache php extension 2.2.3
- xdebug php extension 2.0.3
- tcpwrap php extension 1.0
- perl Compress::Zlib
- mysql ruby gems 2.7
- postgres ruby gem 0.7.1

Significant changes have been made to the Ruby package. According to a senior staff engineer in the Performance & Application Engineering Group, “It should also be easy to install any new gem that requires native compilation using gcc - this should just work out of the box.” Performance enhancements for Ruby have shown a 20-30 percent improvement, with SPARC-specific patches improving performance another 8-15 percent, he writes.

See Cool Stack 1.3 documentation and Changelog for more details.

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.