System News for Sun Users - The Blog

The Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is a “storage for the Internet”.  A web services interface can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. The S3 feature set includes:

• Write, read, and delete objects containing from 1 byte to 5 gigabytes of data each. The number of objects you can store is unlimited.
• Each object is stored in a bucket and retrieved via a unique, developer-assigned key.
• A bucket can be located in the United States or in Europe. All objects within the bucket will be stored in the bucket’s location, but the objects can be accessed from anywhere.
• Authentication mechanisms are provided to ensure that data is kept secure from unauthorized access. Objects can be made private or public, and rights can be granted to specific users.
• Uses standards-based REST and SOAP interfaces designed to work with any Internet-development toolkit.
• Built to be flexible so that protocol or functional layers can easily be added.  Default download protocol is HTTP.  A BitTorrent(TM) protocol interface is provided to lower costs for high-scale distribution.  Additional interfaces will be added in the future.
• Reliability backed with the Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement.

There is a fee for storage (15c per GB=month in the US) and a fee for data transferred  in (10c per GB) and out (starting at  17c per GB and going down with volume). There is also a small fee for PUT, POST, GET and LIST requests.

Amazon EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. To use Amazon EC2:

• Create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) containing your applications, libraries, data and associated configuration settings. Or use pre-configured, templated images to get up and running immediately.
• Upload the AMI into Amazon S3. Amazon EC2 provides tools that make storing the AMI simple. Amazon S3 provides a safe, reliable and fast repository to store your images.
• Use Amazon EC2 web service to configure security and network access.
• Start, terminate, and monitor as many instances of your AMI as needed, using the web service APIs.
• Pay only for the resources that you actually consume, like instance-hours or data transfer.

OpenSolaris on ECS

Sun  and Amazon are collaborating to offer OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2. The two supported releases are OpenSolaris OS 2008.05 and Solaris Express Community Edition.

Saving and Restoring ZFS Snapshots to and from Amazon S3

Sean O’Dell has posted a blog entry that shows how to use ZFS snapshots to “save and restore filesystems from one Solaris EC2 instance to another.”

Scott McNealy. in top form, delivered a 45-talk this month to a group of entrepreneurs in the UK.

He shared some his personal experiences in staring Sun Microsystems and some insights into his management philosophy.

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.

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.

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.”