System News for Sun Users - The Blog

White Paper Highlights Key Oracle Database 11g Capabilities

A 22-page Oracle white paper focuses on key Oracle Database 11g capabilities that its authors believe can help IT departments better optimize their storage infrastructure and enable administrators to deliver a cost effective, scalable information management platform, which is easy to manage, and continues to deliver the required performance and availability needed in their datacenters.

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Key Business Benefits of HSPs

Hybrid storage pools (HSPs) enable users to deploy multiple types of storage media together and manage them as a single pool. An Oracle-Sun white paper provides insight into HSPs and discusses their primary benefits, including increased throughput without a full-scale SSD deployment; simplified and centralized management of hybrid storage environments; increased flexibility and scalability for future performance or capacity issues; and much more.

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Tools Help Assess, Ease Understanding and Reporting of Storage Workloads

Interested in better understanding storage I/O workloads? Then take some time to learn more about SWAT and Vdbench. In two separate BestPerf blog entries, Henk Vandenbergh describes the storage agnostic Sun StorageTek Workload Analysis Tool, known as SWAT, detailing its features and the disk and tape I/O workload generator called Vdbench.

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Also Will Reduce Energy Usage and Cooling Load

An argument is made for the use of SSD devices in benefiting HPC applications with large I/O components in a Sun BluePrints Online article by Lawrence McIntosh in Sun’s Systems Engineering Solutions Group and Dr. Michael Burke in Sun’s Strategic Applications Engineering. The two compare traditional hard disk drives (HDDs) and the newer solid state drive (SSD) technology in high-performance computing (HPC) applications. Application-based benchmarking and storage performance benchmark testing are used and demonstrate significant benefits in the use of SSD devices for HPC applications with large I/O components, the authors conclude.

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Learn More About ZFS and SPEC CPU2006, IO and Memory Consumption

Performance Engineer John L. Henning shares why he has lost his fear of ZFS since many of his previous concerns have been resolved as the technology has improved over time, and he has learned more about using the Sun file system. SPEC CPU benchmarks and IO are areas that he previously had some trepidations about, and another was the consumption of memory that ZFS had been rumored to make. In an article posted on his blog, he shows why he can now embrace the features of ZFS.

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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.”