Archive for the ‘Fishworks’ Category
Leaving Oracle
I first came to Sun over 4 years ago for an internship in the Solaris kernel group. I was excited to work with such a highly regarded group of talented engineers, and my experience that summer was no disappointment: I learned a lot and had a blast. After college, I joined Sun’s Fishworks team. Despite [...]
SS7000 Software Updates
In this entry I’ll explain some of the underlying principles around software upgrade for the 7000 series. Keep in mind that nearly all of this information are implementation details of the system and thus subject to change. Entire system image One of the fundamental design principles about SS7000 software updates is that all releases update [...]
Replication for disaster recovery
When designing a disaster recovery solution using remote replication, two important parameters are the recovery time objective (RTO) and the recovery point objective (RPO). For these purposes, a disaster is any event resulting in permanent data loss at the primary site which requires restoring service using data recovered from the disaster recovery (DR) site. The [...]
Replication in 2010.Q1
This post is long overdue since 2010.Q1 came out over a month ago now, but it’s better late than never. The bullet-point feature list for 2010.Q1 typically includes something like "improved remote replication", but what do we mean by that? The summary is vague because, well, it’s hard to summarize what we did concisely. Let’s [...]
Remote Replication Introduction
When we first announced the SS7000 series, we made available a simulator (a virtual machine image) so people could easily try out the new software. At a keynote session that evening, Bryan and Mike challenged audience members to be the first to set up remote replication between two simulators. They didn’t realize how quickly someone [...]
Threshold alerts
I’ve previously discussed alerts in the context of fault management. On the 7000, alerts are just events of interest to administrators, like "disk failure" or "backup completion" for example. Administrators can configure actions that the system takes in response to particular classes of alert. Common actions include sending email (for notification) and sending an SNMP [...]
Anatomy of a DTrace USDT provider
Note: the information in this post has been updated with a complete source example. This post remains for historical reference. I’ve previously mentioned that the 7000 series HTTP/WebDAV Analytics feature relies on USDT, the mechanism by which developers can define application-specific DTrace probes to provide stable points of observation for debugging or analysis. Many projects [...]
2009.Q2 Released
Today we’ve released the first major software update for the 7000 series, called 2009.Q2. This update contains a boatload of bugfixes and new features, including support for HTTPS (HTTP with SSL using self-signed certificates). This makes HTTP user support more tenable in less secure environments because credentials don’t have to be transmitted in the clear. [...]
Compression followup
My previous post discussed compression in the 7000 series. I presented some Analytics data showing the effects of compression on a simple workload, but I observed something unexpected: the system never used more than 50% CPU doing the workloads, even when the workload was CPU-bound. This caused the CPU-intensive runs to take a fair bit [...]
Compression on the Sun Storage 7000
Built-in filesystem compression has been part of ZFS since day one, but is only now gaining some enterprise storage spotlight. Compression reduces the disk space needed to store data, not only increasing effective capacity but often improving performance as well (since fewer bytes means less I/O). Beyond that, having compression built into the filesystem (as [...]
