Short Items of Interest for Solaris Users
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.
Sun Fire Servers, Intel SSDs Help Music Streaming Architecture Scale 
Last.fm is a popular Internet radio site for music. Founded in 2002, it now claims over 30 million active users based in more than 200 countries. In its early stages of development, Last.fm turned to Sun and the Sun Startup Essentials program to help it get up and running. Over the past two or so years, Sun has saved the organization money, reduced its output, and helped Last.fm scale beyond boundaries it never thought feasible, writes Sun’s Stewart Townsend, who shares a blog from Last.fm engineering team member Mike Brodbelt on its Xbox LIVE launch.
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.
High and Low End Products Expected in First Half of Next Year
New Sun OpenStorage products planned for 2010 have been revealed and reported to SearchStorage. These include a new high-end 7000 series storage product, two new JBODs (Just a Bunch Of Disks) and an entry-level device that can hold up to 60 SAS2 drives.
Free Sun Startup Essentials Webinar
Databases are a key part of any application. The storage subsystem contributes most to performance of the database. In recent days, new storage technologies like Solid State Storage (SSD) and high performance drives are becoming cheaper and more accessible, but it takes a lot of planning to use these technologies in a cost effective way for best price-performance. Get tips and tricks for tuning storage systems for database workloads in a free Sun Startup Essentials Webcast presented by Senior Architect Angelo Rajadurai.
A Sun BluePrints Article and White Paper Explains How 
Sun recently published a Sun BluePrints article and a white paper on its new Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array. The article shows how to apply the Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array as storage for database indexes in order to accelerate application performance. The white paper describes the array’s architectures and technologies, as well as storage deployment considerations.
Power Efficient Flash Array for Accelerating Database Applications 
Get fully-integrated Flash-based storage with Flash-optimized software in the new Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array that strives to accelerate Oracle and MySQL database workloads and optimize storage architectures. It features up to two terabytes of solid-state Flash capacity, 1.6 million read and 1.2 million write IOPS performance. Available in a single rack unit (1.75 inches), the new array consumes 300 watts of energy, Sun reports.
The Challenges of a SAN Between Servers and Storage 
Joerg Moellenkamp does the math to demonstrate that latency does indeed matter when there is SAN between your server and your storage. He pits a direct-connected storage-server configuration that uses a 10 meter long cable against a second configuration that uses a director or a switch and two five meter cables.
Adds ZFS User and Group Quotas, L2ARC Support, Faster Patching, and More
Sun released Solaris 10 10/09 with new and enhanced features, such as up to two Tbytes disk support for installing and booting the OS, ZFS and Flash installation support, updates to setting ZFS user and group quotas, support of L2ARC, power management capabilities to leverage the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, a “P2V” (Physical to Virtual) method, faster patching and parallel zone patching, etc. There are many more system administration, installation, system resources, device management, system performance, driver, and freeware enhancements included.
