Learn the Basics as Well as Indepth Looks at ZFS, DTrace and How to Contribute
India’s largest IT magazine Digit published a special 96 page mini book entitled “Fast Track to OpenSolaris” that covers Install, ZFS, DTrace, Source Juicer, and more. Kumar Abhishek, leader of the Mumbai OpenSolaris User Group, authored the piece, described as a “quick and dirty guide to OpenSolaris”. The mini book is now available for download.
Some First Steps for Budding Storage Service Vendors
“Proof of Concept for a Simple Storage Service,” an article by Carol Zhang and Case Cao on the Sun Developer Network, briefly introduces the components that make up a storage service, describes in detail how to use Apache web server to set up a proof of concept (PoC) for a simple storage service, and touches on issues affecting storage service in the real world.
DTrace Aids in Identifying Latency Causes
A duel in the Suns of sorts involving a Sun Fire V40z and a Sun Fire X4450 connected back-to-back was performed to discover their ability to exchange UDP or TCP messages with a round-trip latency under 100 ms per message. In addition, both servers were occupied with some business logic, to bring the overall CPU utilization to 60-80% on each machine. Both were running Solaris 10 Update 5 and Java RTS 2.1 (build 1.5.0_16_Java-RTS-2.1_fcs-b11_RTSJ-1.0.2). Frederic Pariente reports the results in his blog “Real Time opens system and network surveillance to Java,” a proof-of-concept to evaluate Java RTS 2.1 on Solaris 10.
Short Items of Interest for Solaris Users
Provides Basics on Using Tool to Identify Performance Issues
Maria Tishkova demonstrates runtime profiling using DLight, which unifies application and system profiling with DTrace technology on Solaris platforms. System profiling tools like DLight allows for the exploration of a system to help users understand how the system works and track down performance problems across many software layers.
An Academic Shares Her Experience with the Open Source OS
Sun’s cutting-edge innovations is one of the reasons many universities collaborate with the vendor. British Columbia’s Simon Fraser University (SFU) is an example. In a nine-minute video, Sun Staff Engineer Eric Saxe discusses SFU’s collaboration with Sun on OpenSolaris with Alexandra (Sasha) Fedorova, SFU assistant professor in the School of Computing Science, who shares why she believes the open source OS is a great research and teaching tool.
Lower Cost, Greater Flexibility than Proprietary Storage Solutions
The Sun white paper “Sun Open Storage: A Lower-cost, Higher Performance Alternative for the Enterprise” argues that the high cost and inherent lack of flexibility of proprietary enterprise storage solutions lends compelling appeal to Sun’s Open Storage offerings. Using industry-standard components and open-source software, open storage enables enterprises to build highly scalable, reliable, and flexible storage systems to fit their growing demands - all at a fraction of the cost of traditional, proprietary storage, the white paper maintains.
How to Use DTrace Probes to Observe PostgreSQL Operations and Tune Accordingly
“Optimizing PostgreSQL Application Performance with Solaris Dynamic Tracing” is one of several Sun BluePrints articles that focus on optimizing Web 2.0 solutions. Author Robert Lor describes how Solaris DTrace functionality can help with PostgreSQL database application tuning. Specifically, the article includes examples showing aspects of PostgreSQL database server operation that can be observed using DTrace probes. The article assumes that the reader has a basic understanding of the Solaris OS, Solaris DTrace, the PostgreSQL database server and general database application development.
Short Items of Interest to Solaris Users
Short News Items of Interest for SysAdmins
