System News for Sun Users - The Blog

Scalable Solution Enables Easy Management of 25% Growth Rate Month-over-month

The more than 250,000 artists and other music professionals who rely on the web-based platform provided by Germany’s SoundCloud to send, receive and distribute their music find the experience enhanced by the company’s use of Sun servers, Open Storage and the Startup Essentials Program, which have enabled SoundCloud to achieve a monthly growth rate of 25%. SoundCloud availed itself of the services of Sun Startup Essentials to migrate its Web server stack to a solution that includes virtual servers and a hybrid storage pool built with Sun technologies.

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Hands-on, Instructor-led Training Introduces VDI 3 Technology, Software Administration

Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure 3 Implementation Workshop (VM-450) is a five-day workshop that introduces Sun’s VDI technology and software administration. Along with installing Sun VDI Software 3, individuals signing up for the Sun training course will be introduced to the architectural details of the software, as well as VDI components and features such as Sun xVM VirtualBox and VMware Virtual Center desktop brokers.

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Reviewer Calls Performance ‘Brilliant’

In an exhaustive review, ILM Informatique put the Sun Storage 7110 Unified Storage System through its paces during a 60-day try-and-buy period and came up with a verdict that should be pleasing to Sun’s marketing staff: “The Sun Storage 7110 Unified Storage System makes it easier than ever to simplify your storage for less. The easy-to-use appliance is ideal for enterprise workgroups, remote offices or SMBs, and offers enterprise storage at entry-level prices.”

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It’s Free and Part of ZFS So Why Not Use It?

While built-in filesystem compression might not be the greatest thing
since sliced bread in blogger Dave Pacheco’s view, he does assert that
it is far superior to using an external appliance between storage and
clients to do the job. In his blog “Compression on the Sun Storage
7000″ he presents the results of an experiment that demonstrates the
utility of the built-in compression feature of ZFS.

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Sun Modular Datacenter to Carry 3 Petabytes of Information for Non-profit Digital Library

As one of the fastest growing digital libraries in the world, Internet Archive decided it needed a more flexible and open storage architecture. The non-profit organization looked to Sun to help with two important technological challenges: storing massive amounts of data and ensuring this data will be preserved in the future. It selected the Sun Modular Datacenter (Sun MD) platform, comprised of open storage technology like Solaris ZFS and Sun Fire systems, as the basis of its datacenter.

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Most Bang for the Buck in Its Class

In the eyes of InfoWorld’s Paul Venezia, the Sun Storage 7210 Unified Storage System is a winner. The combination of 48 drives, SSD log storage, broad protocol support, ZFS, and amazing GUI make for one great filer, he writes, labeling the solution “a tank in every sense of the word,”… that carves out a niche for itself in a wide variety of infrastructures.

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A Useful Perspective on the Technology

“Open storage refers to storage systems built with an open architecture using industry-standard hardware and open-source software,” writes Aaron Newcomb in his blog entitled “What Is Open Storage Anyway?” He continues with comments on open source software, open standards and open architecture, all in an effort to address the concerns potential users might have concerning the illusion that reliability is a quality found only in the proprietary realm.

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Securely Handle Encryption Keys Without Additional Licensing

The first open source generic communication protocol between a Key Manager and an encrypting device has been released by Sun, enabling partners to adopt this protocol to securely handle encryption keys without additional licensing. The protocol is implemented as a complete toolkit and is downloadable from OpenSolaris under the project name Crypto KMS Agent Toolkit.

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Jeff Cheeney, Storage facilitator, recently posted a ” Storage Community Annual Report“  in which he included these quick facts:

• Projects
  •   36 approved & live
  •   5 approved, not live - waiting for web pages to be created
  •   6 non-Sun leaders
• Community
  •   136 Storage Observers
  •   232 ZFS Observers
  •   27 Core Contributors (all storage communities)
  •   35 Contributors (all storage communities)
• Forum Membership
  •   Storage-discuss: 436
  •   Total: 4082
• Traffic
  •   Web: 697,936 hits/yr
  •   Forums: 14,594 msg/yr
• Blogs:
  •   Posts: 396/ 6 mo
  •   Hits: 752,139 /yr

The List of  OpenSolaris Storage Projects is quite impressive; it is clear that there’s more to “Open Storage” than ZFS and some marketing hype.

The endorsed storage projects include:

• Automatic Data Migration
• Brocade FC HBA - Initiator
• Brocade FC HBA - Target
• CIFS Server
• CIFS client for Solaris
• COMSTAR: Common Multiprotocol SCSI Target
• DTrace Provider for NFSv4
• Data Migration Manager
• Device Mapper
• Emulex Fibre Channel Device Driver
• Ext3 file system support
• Fibre Channel over Ethernet
• Fuse on Solaris
• Hitachi
• HoneyComb Fixed Content Storage
• Journaled File System (JFS)
• Media Management System
• Multi-pathing software (MPxIO)
• NFS RDMA transport update and performance analysis
• NFS Server in non-Global Zones
• NFS version 4.1 pNFS
• NFSv4 namespace extensions
• NPort ID Virtualization (NPIV)
• Network Storage
• Object Storage Device (OSD) support for Solaris
• OpenPegasus CIM Server
• SAM/QFS
• Solaris iSCSI Target
• Squashfs
• Sun StorageTek Availability Suite
• Test Development
• VSCAN service
• ZFS on disk encryption support
• iSCSI Extensions for Remote DMA (iSER)
• iSNS Server
• lofi compression & cryptography support

Jeff lists the goals and futures for the storage community thus:

• A OpenSolaris Storage Developer “summit”
• More community interviews
• Blogs/ Articles/ Recipes on how to deploy the OpenSolaris Storage stack
• Attend and support more events
•   Would love to have some university research based on OpenSolaris
• …. lots more fun …

Dominic Kay and Jeff Cheeney delivered a 30 minute presentation on OpenSolaris Storage technologies at the Open Solaris Developer Conference in Prague on June 28, 2008.

“Open Source + Industry Standards = Open Storage”

The slides for the talk are available here.

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.