System News for Sun Users - The Blog

Can Rebalance Systems, Eliminate I/O Bottlenecks, and Improve End User Experience

Sun staff engineer and technical marketing manager Roger Bitar provides an overview of Flash technology, and discusses its introduction into a new tier of storage infrastructure. In a Sun BluePrints article, Bitar explains how companies can utilize Flash technology and the Solaris ZFS file system to take advantage of the high performance of enterprise solid state drives (SSDs) and other Flash storage devices.

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Tech Tip Explains Partition Alignments for Solaris SPARC and Linux Systems

Methods for aligning flash modules for optimal performance are the subject of a tech tip in the System and Application Performance, Monitoring, and Tuning wiki that outlines how to take advantage of the solid state flash devices (SSDs) for Solaris as well as Linux. Both Solaris and Linux methods are explored with this wiki tech tip offering up examples for each. The Solaris example works with SMI and EFI Labels, while the Linux lesson shows the use of fdisk and parted.

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If You Are Looking for More Bang for Your Storage Buck, Look Here

ZFS and hybrid storage pools (HSP) is the subject of a recent posting by Sun blogger “Thin Slice,” who writes about the collaboration between Sun and Intel that has delivered the combination of ZFS and high performance, flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) to offer enterprises cutting-edge HSP innovation that can reduce the risk, cost, complexity, and deployment time of multi-tiered storage environments.

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Solutions Accommodate Growth, Improve Service Delivery

Monmouth Independence Network (MINET) is a public utility that delivers voice, data and cable services to 3,500 customers in the cities of Monmouth and Independence, Oregon, using Sun technologies. Faced with the need to expand services while minimizing costs, providing for high performance and availability and scaling to support rapid growth, MINET looked to Sun for the servers, unified storage, flash memory, thin clients, and virtualization necessary to meet these business needs.

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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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Cutting Costs with a Single Rack Solution

The white paper “Tiered Storage and Sun Java System Messaging Server” explains how using production products, such as Sun Communications Suite software, the Solaris ZFS file system, and a Sun Storage array, can cut user mailbox storage costs for service providers by half, while performance (measured by messages per second) can be increased by more than 50 percent in environments with millions of users.

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