Sun

Adam Leventhal wrote an really insightful piece about the potential effect of the Hybrid Storage Pool to the storage business in "Casting the shadow of the Hybrid Storage Pool":

What we have today though integrates flash in a way that changes the landscape of storage economics and delivers cost efficiencies that haven't been seen before. If the drives manufacturers don't already, it can't be long until they hear the death knell for 15K RPM drives loud and clear

When the performance of a storage architecture is ensured by SSD there isn´t really a need for low capacity 15k discs ... 7200 rpm (or even lower) drives with high capacity are more than enough.

There must be a standard course at the IBM marketing school. The tricks of the benchmarkting are the same again and again. At least it doesn´t get boring to read at the IBM website. Now i found another benchmarketing stunt at their website. It´s called "Move Up to IBM Power Systems".

It was really fun to read it. IBM Benchmarketing - now with 100% more nonsense. One important disclaimer: The following article just contains the stuff that was obvious at my first read. I have a daytime job that isn´t dissecting IBM marketing stunts

From a discussion about NAT in IPv6:

the only good NAT is a dead NAT

While preparing the next part for the configuration walkthrough of the Sun 7000 my mind was playing with an desire: I want this interface on an soho device. I played around with many NAS boxes but there wasn´t a single interface in the class of the Fishworks interface. Intel Atoms are cheap enough to build real soho NAS devices from it ...

I´ve thought about linking to all this people writing articles about "What Sun should do now?". But at the end most of this articles are written with no background knowledge or with an hidden agenda. So i simply decided not to link to this articles at all.

But there is an article i want to comment. Rich Sharples writes in What Sun Should Do:

#3 Solaris
See above. Linux has won. Whatever technical merit Solaris has today will be commoditized next year. The innovation around Linux is relentless.

Next year ... really? ZFS is available for years now. I don´t see it´s commoditization by any technology in Linux at the moment. Same thing for DTrace. No SSD support besides of simply using it as a faster disk.

And i know, all those Linux people will cry "Foul" but i do not really see innovation in the Linux kernel. Having many hardware drivers in the kernel isn´t an innovation. Commoditization and innovation are diametral concepts. Linux is good in commoditization, it´s the master in the field of good enough. But it fails in the field of innovating. And to get interesting technologies (besides of drivers) Linux need strong competitors. We don´t stand still. There are other interesting technologies in their creation that will gives us a good technological lead.

By the way. To understand Mr. Sharples standpoint you should know, that he is "Director, Product Management at Red Hat". What a strange luck that he suggests to drop products that could hurt his employer. I tend to say this is a kind of hidden agenda.

From my perspective, Sun has just to learn one thing: Learning to kick the butts of our competitors with their good enough products and learning to make more money from our innovations. But: You don´t make money by dropping them.

A new version of Virtualbox is available at the usual location. Version 2.0.6 fixes some bugs as described in the changelog. Thanks to Constantin for the hint.

TPM adds many speculations to the bits of truth in an article at the Register (fueled by this Flag Day announcement). No confirmations or declines about the stuff in the article.

We announced in the press release "Wikimedia Selects Sun Microsystems to Enhance Multimedia Experience for Expanding User-Base Worldwide and Accommodate Explosive Growth of Rich Content"(who uses such fscking long headlines ?!? ), that the Wikipedia will use Sun hardware and software for it´s service:

The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia and other free-content projects, announced today that it has selected Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ:JAVA) [...] to help it build a secure and scalable open source web infrastructure using Sun Fire(TM) x4500 and x4150 servers and Sun StorageTek(TM) storage arrays.
[...]
By implementing Sun's open source MySQL(TM) database and Sun Open Storage infrastructure, we are in a position to create a better and faster user experience.

Just a teaser. There is an interesting putback in Opensolaris Build 104:

PSARC 2008/665 Tenaya Platform Software Support
6766865 Solaris support needed for SPARC-Enterprise-T3120

adds support for Tenaya platform to Nevada

No, i will not tell you more And this putback doesn´t disclose so much stuff like the M3000 support putback

I´ve stopped to think about all the articles from analysts or newspaper articles about Sun. Reading them leads to the instant urge to ask your doc for Prozac or Effexor. Mostly they are underinformed, heavily biased to other computer companies or just outright sensational. I don´t want to tell you that all is well in the sunny kingdom. But my outlook for the next 2 years looks really positive.

Glen Brunette describes at the Sun Wiki the concept of the Immutable Service Containers (ISC):

Immutable Service Containers (ISC) are an architectural pattern used to describe a platform for highly secure service delivery. While the actual instantiation of an ISC can differ based upon customer and application requirements, an ISC embodies at its core the key principles inherent in the Sun Systemic Security framework including: self-preservation, defense in depth, least privilege, compartmentalization and proportionality.

A really interesting concept! By delivering the service by a zone in conjunction of denying write access to the binaries or configurations and vastly locking down the privileges you can build a really secure environment.

Not a good way to start the day as i´ve found a mail from Jonathan and some Google Alerts mails not much later. Sun will cut costs in the verge of a recession of the worldwide economy. eWeeks write for example in "Sun Flames 6,000 Workers in Cost-Cutting Bid":

The company says that falling demand for high-end hardware is behind its losses and forcing budget and staffing cuts. The layoffs, which will eliminate as much as 18 percent of Sun's workforce, will save the company $700 million to $800 million. The company will incur a charge of as much as $500 million as a result of the layoffs and restructuring its software division.

I hope that you won´t say after this walkthrough, that Sun can't develop a decent GUI. I´ve used the VMware based storage simulator for the Sun Storage 7000 series to create a short walkthrough to the installation of an Fishworks based system.

Paul Venezia wrote an article about this opinion about the new 7000 series and comes to an interesting conclusion:

So, in the immortal words of Kent Brockman, I, for one, welcome our new storage overlords.

BTW: He will publish a test of the 7410 soon.

Adam Leventhal brings it to a concise point where the new Sun Storage 7000 systems are really different from other systems besides of this cool administration interface:

Further, you can design the specific system you need with just the right balance of write IOPS, read IOPS, throughput, capacity, power-use, and cost. Once you have a system, the Hybrid Storage Pool lets you solve problems with targeted solutions. Need capacity? Add disk. Out of read IOPS? Toss in another Readzilla or two. Write bogging down? Another Logzilla will net you another 10,000 write IOPS. In the old model, of course, all problems were simple because the solution was always the same: buy more fast drives. The HSP in the 7410 lets you address the specific problem you're having without paying for a solution to three other problems that you don't have.

At the end, one of the core differentiators are the hybrid storage pools. ZFS gives us with the HSP an important advantage. Furthermore it makes difficult questions simple. For example mirroring write caches in RAID controllers: Many of our competitors use special interconnects to mirror the cache from one controller to another. When your write cache is a drive in a JBOD you don´t have to mirror the cache, you just import the drive to the surviving filer node.

Many problems become simple, when you think about them from another perspective ... you just have to start to think.

This gives for Sun and the Opensolaris community an important lead: It may be easy to replicate the GUI, it may be easy just to take commodity hardware, but it isn´t easy to copy dtrace and it isn´t easy to copy ZFS.