illumos and ZFS days
Back in October I was pleased to attend — and my employer, Delphix, was pleased to sponsor — illumos day and ZFS day, run concurrently with Oracle Open World. Inspired by the success of dtrace.conf(12) in the Spring, the goal was to assemble developers, practitioners, and users of ZFS and illumos-derived distributions to educate, share [...]
In: illumos, ZFS · Tagged with: HSP, illumos, OpenSolaris, OracleSolaris, talk, ZFS
DTrace for Linux
Yesterday (October 4, 2011) Oracle made the surprising announcement that they would be porting some key Solaris features, DTrace and Zones, to Oracle Enterprise Linux. As one of the original authors, the news about DTrace was particularly interesting to me, so I started digging. I should note that this isn’t the first time I’ve written [...]
In: DTrace · Tagged with: DTrace, illumos, Linux, OEL, OOW, OpenSolaris, Oracle, Solaris
The future of Solaris
In 2005, Sun released the source code to Solaris, described then as the company’s crown jewel. Why do this? The simplest answer is that Solaris had been losing ground to an open source competitor in Linux. Losing ground was a symptom of economics. Students who had once been raised on Solaris were being inculcated with [...]
In: illumos, OpenSolaris · Tagged with: illumos, OpenSolaris, Oracle, Sun
Joining Delphix
As I wrote about last time, I’ve left Oracle. What I was looking for in my next gig was technology that excites me, excellent management, and a chance to build something significant and successful. I’m confident that I’ve found those things with Delphix. In the established database market, Delphix creates a virtualization layer that simplifies [...]
In: Delphix · Tagged with: Delphix, illumos, OpenSolaris
Farewell to Bryan Cantrill
I’ve been expecting this automated mail for a while now, but it was disheartening nonetheless: List: dtrace-discuss Member: bryan.cantrill@eng.sun.com Action: Subscription disabled. Reason: Excessive or fatal bounces. As one of the moderators of the DTrace discussion list, I see people subscribe and unsubscribe. Bryan has, of course, left Oracle and joined Joyent to be their [...]
In: DTrace · Tagged with: BryanCantrill, DTrace, FFMF, Fishworks, Joyent, OpenSolaris
Triple-Parity RAID-Z
Double-parity RAID, or RAID-6, is the de facto industry standard for storage; when I started talking about triple-parity RAID for ZFS earlier this year, the need wasn’t always immediately obvious. Double-parity RAID, of course, provides protection from up to two failures (data corruption or the whole drive) within a RAID stripe. The necessity of triple-parity [...]
In: ZFS · Tagged with: Fishworks, GaloisField, OpenSolaris, RAID-Z, raidz3, Solaris, ZFS
Expand-O-Matic RAID-Z
I was having a conversation with an OpenBSD user and developer the other day, and he mentioned some ongoing work in the community to consolidate support for RAID controllers. The problem, he was saying, was that each controller had a different administrative model and utility — but all I could think was that the real [...]
In: ZFS · Tagged with: OpenSolaris, RAID-Z, Solaris, ZFS
Double-Parity RAID-Z
When ZFS first started, it was just Jeff trying to pair old problems with new solutions in margins too small to contain either. Then Matt joined up to bring some young blood to the project. By the time the project putback, the team had grown to more than a dozen. And now I’ve been pulled [...]
In: ZFS · Tagged with: GaloisField, OpenSolaris, RAID-Z, raidz2, Solaris, ZFS
DTrace for Linux
With BrandZ, it’s now possible to use DTrace on Linux applications. For the uninitiated, DTrace is the dynamic tracing facility in OpenSolaris; it allows for systemic analysis of a scope and precision unequalled in the industry. With DTrace, administrators and developers can trace low level services like I/O and scheduling, up the system stack through [...]
In: DTrace · Tagged with: brandz, DTrace, Linux, OpenSolaris, Solaris