Solaris

IBM: UNIX to Linux Migration Rate Growing

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Skipping a few paragraphs to get to the meat of the article...
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Inna Kuznetsova, Director, Linux Strategy, led the meeting attended by IT analysts and painted a telling picture of what IBM's Linux business has been in recent months: in short, strong and growing. To give an idea of this strength, Kuznetsova reported that in the past three years, over 1,800 customers have migrated from competitive platforms to IBM, and nearly 50 percent of those IBM wins included Linux.

IBM is also picking up a lot of business from Sun, having doubled their number of Sun customer wins between first quarter and second quarter 2009. Kuznetsova attributed these recent moves to customer uncertainly regarding Sun following the recent takeover bid from Oracle.

DOJ Approves $7.4B Oracle-Sun Deal

Oracle on Thursday said the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has approved its $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems, although the deal is subject to certain conditions and still needs the blessing of European regulators.

Oracle first announced its bid in April and Sun shareholders approved the acquisition on July 16.

The combined company will give Oracle an array of new assets, including a stake in the computer hardware market, the open-source MySQL database and stewardship of the Java programming language.

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Oracle will undoubtedly cut a large portion of lesser-performing sectors of the company. I'm afraid that this might be the death-knell for SPARC-based processors; including the Niagara and UltraSPARC T-2.

Sun certainly has it right with these processors; they boast very low power consumption and up to 64-way SMT on 8 cores per chip. Compare that to your 4-way SMT AMD64 Phenoms and the like.

I don't forsee [Open]Solaris going anywhere anytime soon. Solaris has long been the platform of choice for large Oracle installations, and I see the Solaris+Java combination as being the crown jewels to Oracle. Oracle has embraced open-source to a pretty fair degree thus far, so I see no reason that they would try to close OpenSolaris or anything similar.

I could honestly not care less what becomes of MySQL. It's been a sub-standard RDBMS from the very get-go. PostgreSQL serves just fine for single-database solutions; and I'd recommend Oracle RAC for clustered/multi-master replication scenarios.
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Greenplum Database

Greenplum Database is the first open source powered database software that can scale to support multi-terabyte data warehousing demands. Greenplum Database allows organizations to analyze vast amounts of business data 10 to 100 times faster than traditional data warehouse solutions at a fraction of the cost.

Key Features of Greenplum Database

• Faster Reporting and Analytics
  
• Dramatic Cost Reduction
  
• Centralized Cluster Management and Administration
  
• Linear Scalability and Flexibility
  
• Modular Performance and Capacity Scale-Out Capability

Greenplum Database's fundamental breakthrough is its ability to store and process terabytes of data using clusters of low-cost servers. Greenplum Database moves processing power as close as possible to the data, so processing always occurs in parallel, delivering a dramatic boost in query and load performance. In addition, Greenplum Database's Dynamic Provisioning technology makes it easy to add incremental data warehouse capacity when needed, avoiding costly appliance upgrades.

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It looks like there might finally be a decent option for PostgreSQL scalability. I have not personally used this software, yet, but I will be installing it shortly. I intend to do some benchmarks versus a stand-alone PostgreSQL database and see how the numbers match up.

If this solution is half as good as the website touts it to be, then Oracle may end up losing some serious ground in the SMB (Small-to-Medium Business) market.
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High-Level Architecture: A database in Greenplum is actually an array of individual databases, usually running on different servers or hosts, all working together to present a single database image. The Greenplum master is the primary entry point to the Greenplum Database System. It is the database instance where users connect to the database and execute SQL statements. The master coordinates the work amongst the other database instances in the system-the Greenplum segments, which is where the user data resides.

Mirroring and Fault Tolerance: When you deploy your Greenplum Database system, you have the option to configure mirror segments. Mirror segments allow database queries to fail over to a backup segment if the primary segment is unavailable.

Greenplum Database is able to detect when a host is unavailable or when a segment database server process is down. When this occurs the master will mark the primary segments on that host as out-of-service and immediately switch over to the mirror segments so that the operation can continue.

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Why is Greenplum Database better-suited to business intelligence and data warehousing than databases like Oracle?
Greenplum Database’s “shared-nothing” architecture is optimal for fast queries and loads because it places processors as close as possible to the data itself, and performs queries and other operations with the maximum degree of parallelism possible. “OLTP” architectures like Oracle’s were designed and built with an entirely different purpose and are not capable of the kinds of parallelism, or performance, that Greenplum Database delivers.

How is that Greenplum can deliver a product like Greenplum Database, but no other company or organization has to date?
When the founders of Greenplum converged in 2003, they set out to change the game. They saw that enterprise software, and particularly database software, was far too expensive and performed badly. Our uniquely capable team includes some of the best minds in the industry, with experts from Oracle, Teradata, Sybase, Informix, Netezza, PostgreSQL, HPTi, CalTech, MIT, Stanford University, and other leading companies, organizations and institutions. Greenplum Database is the result of the confluence of Greenplum’s unique vision and vast experience in the midst of undeniable industry trends.

NetApp Hits Sun with Patent-Infringement Lawsuit

Network Appliance Inc. [today] announced that it has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Sun Microsystems Inc. seeking unspecified compensatory damages and an injunction that would prohibit Sun from developing or distributing products based on its ZFS file system technology.

The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court in Lufkin, Texas, charges that the Sun ZFS technology infringes on seven NetApp patents pertaining to data processing systems and related software.

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Sun declined to comment on the lawsuit.

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Maybe Sun's regular PR machine declined to comment, but you can be sure that Jonathan Schwartz has something to say about it. More on that later.
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Storage analysts said that a drawn-out legal battle would likely hurt Sun more than NetApp because of the importance of ZFS to Sun's core storage strategy. In addition, analysts pointed out that the case could set legal precedent involving the viability of open-source storage.

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Is this another Microsoft-backed FUD-fest like the whole SCO debacle? Maybe, maybe not.

In my opinion, NetApp is grasping at straws as they see their market disappearing. I'd take a SAN with a Solaris box, ZFS pools, and NFS over a NetApp any day of the week. It appears that Jonathan Schwartz shares the same opinion:

Finally, and perhaps most importantly (again, read here for why), I'd like to thank our friends at NetApps for ensuring every single customer in their installed base is aware of the outstanding economics offered by ZFS as a file system and storage virtualization platform. Please feel free to (learn more here) and get a free trial Thumper storage device here. At $1.50 per gigabyte - open source storage is about a third the price of competitive offerings, with better performance.

And Sun indemnifies its customers, so I'd encourage all interested parties to compare the economics of ZFS and Thumper to what you're currently forced to pay - the savings are absolutely shocking.

The rise of the open source community cannot be stifled by proprietary vendors. I guess not everyone's learned that lesson.

I'd say that pretty much sums it up.
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Sun Hopes for Linux-like Solaris

In an effort to spur adoption of Solaris, Sun Microsystems has begun a project code-named Indiana to try to give its operating system some of the trappings of Linux.

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People are interested in Solaris technology such as DTrace, which lets administrators peer deeply into running software to uncover performance bottlenecks, and ZFS, file system software designed to make storage systems more reliable and easier to manage. But good luck to Linux fans trying to kick the tires.

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"Good luck?" Since Solaris 8 or so, it's been more and more like Linux every day. Solaris 10 might as well be Linux as far as I'm concerned. Most of the userspace is GNU code by default now. GNU ps, grep, awk, and many other common shell utilities.

My ideal combination would be the GNU userspace that Linux uses with the Solaris kernel (DTrace, ZFS, FSS, etc) incorporating Linux's netfilter subsystem.
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My OpenSolaris DVD kit came in today, or has been sitting in the mail room for a while.

The kit comes with 2 DVDs; the first containing learning materials; Belenix, Schillix, and Nexenta live CDs; a Nexenta install, and the OpenSolaris source code. The second disk has Solaris Express Community Edition b57.

Comparing the Multilevel Security Policies of the Solaris Trusted Extensions and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Systems

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While I've not had a chance to read all of this article yet, it appears to go fairly in-depth with the Mandatory Access Controls available to both Solaris and Linux. Keep in mind that this is hosted on sun.com, so it's probably a little biased. ;)
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Why ZFS for Home

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A great look at Sun's ZFS filesystem from the Unix Admin Corner.

My next storage solution will almost certainly be a COTS x86 system with Solaris 10 and ZFS.
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Sun Sees Server Revenue Jump in Q2

Sun Microsystems, which has been undergoing a drastic realignment of its server business over the past couple of years, in the second quarter regained its position as the world's third-largest systems maker, overtaking rival Dell.

The Santa Clara, Calif., company saw its market share increase to about 13 percent in the second quarter, according to numbers released by analyst firms IDC and Gartner.

In the second quarter of 2005, Sun's market share stood at between 11 and 12 percent.

In addition, Sun was the only one of the four top server makers to see growth in its revenues. The company's server revenues grew 13.7 to 15.5 percent year to year, according to the firms. IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Dell saw revenue declines of between 1.3 and 3.8 percent.

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Could this be the turn of a new leaf for Sun? They're down, but certainly not out.
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Sun until two years ago had long shunned the x86 space in favor of its own RISC-based SPARC line. In a turnabout, Sun adopted Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron processor as the basis for a new line of x86 systems and has aggressively grown out its product line. The bulk of the company's server business is still the UltraSPARC line, but Eastwood said he expects that the Opteron systems will continue to grow in significance.

In July, Sun added to its line of Opteron-based Galaxy systems, introducing a blade server and a system than can scale to 16 processors.

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There is a multitude of reasons Sun was hesitant to get into the x86 market. Firstly, there is already fierce competition. Who wants to enter a low-margin market last? Dell, HP, and others have been selling servers based on x86 for ages. Secondly, they're just now building a system scalable to 16 processors. Maybe people don't know this, but SPARC is short-hand for Scalable Processor ARChitecture. Sun already has the capability to build servers with 1,024+ SPARC processors per system image.
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SPEC SFS Benchmark of ZFS,UFS,VxFS

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A benchmark of ZFS, UFS, and VxFS.
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UNIX IP Stack Tuning Guide from Team Cymru

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This is an excellent document detailing the fine-tuning aspects of the IP stack on Unix. Flavors include AIX, Solaris, Tru64, HP-UX, Linux, FreeBSD and IRIX.
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