Blog Posts

One of the first things that customers and sales teams realize when dealing with Engineered Systems is: They fundamentally change the IT architecture of a business.

Change is good, it means progress. But change is sometimes seen as a bad thing: Change comes with fear.

The truth is that Engineered Systems really empower IT architects to add value to their business, application and data architectures, without worrying about the technology architecture.

To understand this, we need to dig a bit deeper into Enterprise Architecture, specifically the TOGAF flavor of it.

If you’ve been following my blog or the Systemhelden.com podcast for some time, then you probably know that I’m a big fan of and small investor in the movie Iron Sky, a crowd-funded science-fiction comedy about the Nazis who went to the dark side of the moon in 1945 and come back to conquer Earth in 2018.

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of attending a pre-screening of the movie’s beta version in Helsinki, Finland. What can I say? It exceeded my high expectations!

I changed into a new role at Oracle: I now work for the EMEA Engineered Systems Architecture Team (ESAT). We support Oracle’s EMEA Engineered Systems business by engaging with customers, enabling our field organization with trainings and through evangelization.

You can call me biased towards Engineered Systems (no link, page no longer exists) now, but that would be like accusing a Mac fanboy of suffering from the Stockholm Syndrome, when it’s actually the other way round.

The other side of the “biased” medal really is that I have a choice of where I want to work, and one of the reasons I changed from my cozy SPARC/Solaris Technology camp to the Engineered Systems crowd is: I believe the world of IT is changing.

Let me explain.

Solaris 11 is here!

And together with the official launch activities, a lot of Oracle and non-Oracle bloggers contributed helpful and informative blog articles to help your datacenter go to eleven.

Here are some notable blog postings, sorted by category for your Solaris 11 blog-reading pleasure:

In about a week, on November 9th, 2011, the long-awaited final version of Solaris 11 will be launched. If you happen to be near New York that day (and assuming there’ll be no power outages), you’re invited to join the official Solaris 11 launch party!

Solaris 11 has been in the making since 2005, when Solaris 10 was launched. In fact, every major Solaris release is just a fork of the ongoing Solaris development train, so the very first uber-pre-release of Solaris 11 was actually generated only weeks after Solaris 10 hit the shelves.

Since then, Solaris 11 (or: Project Nevada as it was called) has seen a lot of OS history: An open source adolescence called OpenSolaris, growing adoption and community work, a broad range of ground-braking new features, long overdue re-writes, brand new concepts, controversial discussions, a major acquisition, rules changed and rules kept, siblings and offsprings, lots of investments, entire companies built on top of its source code, generations of processors and hardware, lots of systems in production, the Cloud and what not.

And all that before it was even born. Quite an achievment, eh?

Maybe I should write more frequently, though that would mean shorter, less elaborate articles. This is the first one of that kind. Let me know what you think!

Recently, the Oracle Solaris 11 Early Adopter Release (no link, page no longer exists) became available on the Oracle Technology Network (BTW, can I have a date with that Java Developer, please?). Here’s the gist:

…that is the question.

Ever since the introduction of deduplication into ZFS, users have been divided into two camps: One side enthusiastically adopted deduplication as a way to save storage space, while the other remained skeptical, pointing out that dedupe has a cost, and that it may not be always the best option.

Let’s look a little deeper into the benefits of ZFS deduplication as well as the cost, because ultimately it boils down to running a cost/benefit analysis of ZFS deduplication. It’s that simple.

More than a while ago, I wrote about the birth of Illumos, a project that aims at substituting the last non-open-source bits from the OpenSolaris kernel with replacements, in order to create a 100% open source Solaris kernel.

On May 20th, I had the opportunity to attend the Nexenta European User Conference 2011 (no link, page no longer exists) in Amsterdam, where Solaris and storage enthusiasts from all over the world met to discuss their favorite technology: ZFS. Of course there was also a lot of talk about Illumos and related projects.

Now I’ve given a lot of Solaris presentations to customers, always highlighting the big, growing and powerful community behind the Solaris OS. But this conference added a new dimension to the Solaris Eco-System for me!

First of all: Apologies for not posting for a long time. The reason? I was having too much fun with node.js and the Joyent Cloud :).

What started as a small experimental hack turned quickly into an exciting new pet project involving the good old Mandelbrot Set, as a web service, running in the Joyent cloud, programmed in node.js.

But first things first: Let’s take a look at node.js as a language and programming model, at the Joyent Cloud and how it relates to Solaris and finally some details on how the picture you see was rendered inside the Joyent Cloud, including an interactive Mandelbrot Set explorer you can play with now, written as a web app.

Last week during WorldHostingDays, I had the opportunity to visit Tom (@tomme), a former colleague of mine who came with Q-Layer to Sun, then to Oracle. Today, he works for a new Belgian startup called Amplidata (no link, amplidata.com no longer exists), a company that specializes in building storage clouds. He introduced me to Wim, their CEO and we discussed their optimized object storage technology, some parallels to ZFS and the newest trends in cloud computing storage. Amplidata is a spin-off of Incubaid, a technology incubator which is responsible for the success of two good old Sun friends: Innotek (VirtualBox) and Q-Layer (The company that powered the Sun Cloud).

One of the first things to do when setting up a new system is to mirror your boot disk. This protects you against system disk failures: If one of the two mirrored boot disks fails, the system can continue running from the other disk without downtime. You can even boot from the surviving mirror half and continue using the system normally, until you have replaced the failed half.

At the currently low prices for boot drive sized disks, this is a no-brainer for increasing your system’s availability, even for a home server system.

Unfortunately, the steps to complete until you’re running off a mirrored ZFS root pool are not yet a no-brainer. While there is a piece of documentation entitled How to Configure a Mirrored Root Pool, it only covers how to add a second disk to your root pool, it does not cover how to prepare and layout a fresh disk so Solaris will accept it as a bootable second half of an rpool mirror.

Which, for historic reasons, is slightly more complicated than just saying zpool attach.

Over the weekend, I sat down and played a bit with the current Oracle Solaris 11 Express (no link, page no longer exists) release in VirtualBox and tested, re-tested and investigated all currently necessary steps to get your root pool mirrored, including some common issues and variations.

Here’s a complete, step-by-step guide with background information on how to mirror your ZFS root pool:

A few weeks ago, a reader asked me a couple of questions about SSDs and ZFS, hinting that this might be a good topic to write a blog post about.

Sure enough, just last week, a couple of similar questions came up, this time from a customer and a colleague at work.

Well, if that’s not a sign from heaven, I don’t know what is, so here’s a collection of frequently asked questions about flash memory (also known as solid state disks, or SSDs) and ZFS, with answers and some useful links, and an index, too.

A deserted street in the docks. The rain is pouring.

A small, old, flower-power style painted Volkswagen van drives by at high speed, then stops below a lifting crane, tires screeching.

The door opens and a woman stumbles out of the vehicle, as if trying to escape. A tall man in uniform catches her violently. Intense exchange of words, probably four-lettered. She hesitates, then follows him back into the van.

“Cut!”

My brother and I are watching from the side of the road. It’s a scene from the upcoming movie Iron Sky (no link, ironsky.net no longer exists), a science-fiction comedy about the Nazis who escaped with UFOs to the dark side of the moon and who come back in 2018 to conquer the earth.

What?

It’s a long, fun story, but you better see it for yourself. Early 2012, that is, when the movie is done.

About 4 years ago, a few colleagues and myself got together and we created a short video about the coolness of two of the most innovative products from Sun of the last decade: ZFS and the X4500 Server.

Today, nearly 4 years later, the video has been downloaded more than 100,000 times (across the original German and the English dubbed version, plus the full resolution downloadable files) and shown to a lot more people during tradeshows, customer demos, etc.

Now YouTube and Google Video (remember?) don’t allow for highest video quality and the old Sun Mediacast server, where we hosted the original MP4 file, no longer exists. Instead, Vimeo has emerged as my video hoster of choice for a variety of projects (check out my video collection on Vimeo) and so it was time to give this video a new home.

A while ago, we discussed some performance analysis basics:

• Define what your problem is.

• Figure out your goal: What metric needs to be in what ballpark for you to declare victory?

• Analyze your system from the inside out: CPU, RAM, Disk, Network. Your Bottleneck is always in one of these 4 regions.

So what are the best commands for finding bottlenecks in each of the four categories above? Here’s part two of my Oracle Solaris Performance cheat sheet with some favorite tricks.

The year 2011 is almost two weeks old, and by now you’ve probably read every other review/resolutions/plans blog post out there. Now you have time to read this one :).

But first of all: Apologies for not having blogged for weeks. I’ve been moving to a new home over the last two months, the holiday season took its toll and there were a few other personal and job projects that demanded my attention.

Now, normality (whatever it is) is starting to come back and I can start devoting more time to this blog again.

This blog is now one year old, although I had been blogging for more than five years before. Time to reflect, plan and flip some switches for the future.

Here’s a quick recap of 2010, some plans and ideas for this blog, a call for feedback and hints to some other projects for 2011.

Whenever you run a professional server, a home server, a hosted virtual server or just a blog on a shared web space, you run a service that provides something useful to your users, readers or whatever consumers your service caters to.

Too bad if things go wrong and you’re the last to notice.

Enter Monitis.com: This service allows you to easily track your servers, websites, blogs or anything else that can be accessed through the internet, or that is able to run a simple agent. Monitoring from the cloud, if you will, at reasonable prices. And if all you need is some basic monitoring, then there’s a free version called mon.itor.us, too.

Let’s check this out in some detail:

At last, it is here: After lots of waiting, speculation, community self-help efforts, future directions, anticipation and more, we’re now holding it in our hands: Oracle Solaris 11 Express is here (no link, page no longer exists)!

While you’re testing/installing/upgrading to this new release, let’s check out the following top 7 cool things about Oracle Solaris 11 Express:

Before we continue our little Performance Analysis Series, let’s look at some current news:

The Bad News: HTTP is dead. Get over it. The killer? It’s called Firesheep, a free Firefox extension that makes it trivially easy for that kid sitting next to you in that Wifi hotspot to steal your Facebook, Twitter or other web services’ identity.

The Victims: The first line of victims are of course millions of unsuspecting users that are sitting in WLAN areas, not knowing that their web identities can be stolen at the click of the button. But the real victims are hundreds, if not thousands of website owners, starting with the who-is-who of web companies, who are now (rightly so) faced with the challenge of upgrading their web infrastructure to HTTPS as soon as possible, preferably overnight.

The Good News: Adding encryption to your web servers used to be an additional burden on the CPU, negatively impacting performance by as much as 2-3x. Fortunately, the new SPARC T3 processors enable you to switch SSL encryption on for your web applications, without any performance impact. This is possible through built-in encryption engines at the core level. And thanks to the Oracle Solaris Cryptographic Framework, it’s easy to take advantage of hardware encryption for any application that needs it.

Wanna learn more? Read on!

Over time, you tend to learn a Solaris performance trick or two. Or three. Or more. That’s cool, it’s how stuff works: You learn, you do, you remember.

Performance analysis and tuning is just like that: You learn a trick from a person that is more senior than you are, you apply it, you feel like a hero, you learn the next trick.

But having a bag of tricks is not enough. Because then you start trying out stuff without a system, and spend useless time hunting that problem with a hit-and-miss approach, gut-based only.

Therefore, I’m always glad to listen to Ulrich Gräf when he does one of his famous performance tuning workshops (if you’re lucky, you can catch Uli blogging in German here (no link, sun.com no longer exists)), because he’ll give you the full view, the context and the system too, when it comes to performance analysis.

So here’s my personal cheat sheet for Oracle Solaris Performance Analysis, including some guideance on how to systematically catch that elusive bottleneck.