System News for Sun Users - The Blog

Technical Lead Bryan Cantrill Parts the Curtain a Bit on this Release

Wiping the sweat from his brow, Fishworks Engineer Bryan Cantrill reflects on the release of the new major Sun Storage 7000 series software update, known as 2010.Q1. Producing this release was no mean feat, Cantrill writes, given that it involved building enterprise-grade storage on commodity components, incorporating entirely new elements like Flash, and creating an ambitious management stack entirely from scratch.

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Is Triple-parity RAID the Answer?

“How much longer will current RAID techniques persevere?” asks Adam Leventhal of Sun Fishworks in his paper for the Association for Computing Machinery entitled “Triple Parity RAID and Beyond.” In the course of answering his question, the author examines RAID and its history, its rate of capacity growth in the hard-drive industry, and the need for triple-parity RAID as a response to diminishing reliability.

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Integrated Way to Migrate Data from Existing Systems to New Systems

Fishworks team member Eric Schrock defines shadow migration - one of the major new features in the Sun Storage 7000 2009.Q3 software release. Schrock explains this project’s conception, development, and birth in a blog entry that outlines the feature’s choice of migrating via interposition versus synchronization, and provides an overview of how shadow migration works.

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A BusinessWeek Interview with Fishworks Mike Shapiro

Evolution of the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System is validation (though none is truly needed) of Peter F. Drucker’s view of how large enterprises deal with innovation. It was his belief that “a couple of guys in a garage” are not the only source of innovation but that, instead, disruptive technologies could as easily emerge from the laboratories of large enterprises if the culture is conducive to their development. Rick Wartzman, director of Claremont Graduate University’s Drucker Institute, considers the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System and the Sun culture from which it grew for BusinessWeek.

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Top 5 Cool Features

Who could put it more simply? Here you will find out the top 5 cool features offered by the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems. Watch the video presentation delivered by Constantin Gonzalez and the special appearance by Brendan Gregg, Fishworks engineer, to find out how users can meet their storage needs with Sun’s Open Storage Systems.

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Fishworks Engineer Brendan Gregg Discovers a Pterodactyl with DTrace

Fishworks engineer Brendan Gregg, who has written previously about Analytics in the Sun Storage 7000 Series, here blogs on its I/O latency features. I/O latency, he writes, is the time to service and respond to an I/O request. Given that clients are often waiting for this to complete, it is often the most interesting metric for performance analysis — more so than IOPS or throughput. Since graphing average I/O latency can result in misleading results, Gregg chooses instead to provide I/O latency as a heat map.

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Sun Engineer Brendan Gregg on the Fishworks team discovered that vocal vibrations affect disk latency through the use of Analytics from Fishworks. In a two-minute YouTube video that has garnered the attention of over a quarter of a million people, Gregg demonstrates how his vocal vibrations cause a sharp spike in the number of I/O operations per disk and a noticeable latency increase on the overall workload.

He offers a screenshot of Analytics on a Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System. He measures disk I/O operations broken down by latency and disk I/O operations that take at least 520 ms broken down by disk using DTrace for performance analysis of the disks. He applies a right workload to two JBODs and then proceeds to yell into them.

The effect of disk vibration is clearly evident. The screenshot shows the latency of the disks has risen and the specific disks affected demonstrate I/O operations longer than 520 ms.

“Amazing stuff,” Gregg pronounces. “This has been made possible by Analytics from Fishworks, which lets us look at things we’ve never seen before.”