Short Items of Interest for SysAdmins
Concise Reference on Setting Up and Administering ZFS
As the title reads, this book is an essentials guide to Solaris 10 ZFS. Numbering only 144 pages, the slim paperback is designed to show its readers how to deploy and manage ZFS file systems. It is particularly useful for those users who are new to Solaris or are using ZFS for the first time. It is easy to get ZFS up and running on a home system or business IT infrastructure by following the simple instructions in this book.
A Brief Highlight of Dissimilarities for Users Moving to OpenSolaris
An OpenSolaris Information Resources article describes what its author determined were the most important differences between OpenSolaris and Linux to assist new users interested in transitioning to OpenSolaris. The article covers the user interface, sudo command, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), top command, prstat command, and file systems. This article offers a brief overview of differences and does contain resource links on the topic for more indepth information.
Getting Familiar with OpenSolaris Is One of the Most Important
Seven tips for OpenSolaris ZFS home server users are offered to readers by Constantin Gonzalez, one of Sun Germany’s principal field technologists. These are tips, he writes, that he found useful in performing his own home server planning, building and installing.
Short Items of Interest for Solaris Users
Short Items of Interest on Security
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.
Learn the Basics as Well as Indepth Looks at ZFS, DTrace and How to Contribute
India’s largest IT magazine Digit published a special 96 page mini book entitled “Fast Track to OpenSolaris” that covers Install, ZFS, DTrace, Source Juicer, and more. Kumar Abhishek, leader of the Mumbai OpenSolaris User Group, authored the piece, described as a “quick and dirty guide to OpenSolaris”. The mini book is now available for download.
Some First Steps for Budding Storage Service Vendors
“Proof of Concept for a Simple Storage Service,” an article by Carol Zhang and Case Cao on the Sun Developer Network, briefly introduces the components that make up a storage service, describes in detail how to use Apache web server to set up a proof of concept (PoC) for a simple storage service, and touches on issues affecting storage service in the real world.
A Less Risky, Less Error-prone Approach
What’s a user to do, faced with needing to back up all the data for a business application stored in a zfs pool without that backup causing an impact on the application itself? Mark Musante presents a solution in his blog “Seven Years of Good Luck: Splitting Mirrors,” where he writes of an alternative to the traditional risky and error prone practice of mirroring the data locally, breaking the mirror and moving the fragments to a new machine for backup. ZFS will do this for you, he concedes, but not easily.
