Sun has published a usable capacity calculator available for the Sun 7000. It was originally written by Adam Leventhal and the latest update from Ryan Matthews is available here. The calculator connects to a 7000 series appliance (or simulator) to calculate the usable capacity. Unfortunately, not everyone has easy access to a system. This is an online version of the calculator so you do not need to have a system locally. It is nothing fancy, but it should get the job done.

The online calculator is here.

You are invited to: The New England Open Solaris User Group (NEOSUG) Meeting

When: June 23rd, 2009 6:00PM to 9:00 PM

Where: Sun Microsystems Burlington Campus; 1 Network Drive, Burlington, MA

RSVP: To Linda Wendlandt: lwendlandt at cptech dot com lwendlandt@cptech.com

Registration Required! - so we can plan food and drink

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In a previous post I discussed the topic of deduplication for capacity optimization. Removing redundant data blocks on disk is the first, and most obvious, phase of deduplication in the marketplace. It helps to drive down the most obvious cost - the cost per GB of disk capacity. This market has grown quickly over the last few years. Both startups and established storage vendors have products that compete in the space. They are most commonly marketed as virtual tape library (VTL) or disk-to-disk backup solutions.

Does that mean that deduplication is a point solution for highly sequential workloads? No. There is another somewhat less obvious benefit of deduplication.

What storage administrator does not ask for more cache in the storage array? If I can afford 8GB, I want 16GB. If the system supports 16GB, I want 32GB. Whether it is for financial or technical reasons, cache is always limited. What about deduplicationg the data in cache? When the workload is streaming sequential backup data from disk, this may not be very helpful. However, in a primary storage system with a more varied workload, this becomes very interesting.

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Sun uses three CPUs as the basis for its products: SPARC VI and VII, SPARC T1 and T2, and x86. Choosing the best CPU, in the best system, to solve a problem is more challenging the more choices there are. Frequently, I’ll be asked to recommend a best-fit solution. Sometimes, I’ll need to debug the performance of a system to determine where its bottlenecks are and if it is the best-fit for the workload. Frequently the “T” CPUs are used in the wrong environment, causing users and sysadmins to be unhappy with the provided performance.

In this blog entry I’ll talk about how to determine whether a given workload will run well on Sun’s T servers (the servers that use the T CPUs).

The T servers have one to four sockets. Each socket holds a CPU with up to eight cores. The CPUs currently range up to 1.4GHZ in clock rate. Each core can have eight “hot” threads, in that eight threads can be making progress on the CPU without the system performing a context switch. However, there are not 8 computation engines per core. Rather, each of the eight threads is round-robin scheduled on the core. For details of the architecture of the Niagara CPUs take a look at the Sun Niagara page. An architecture diagram of a single socket of Niagara II CPU is shown here for easy reference.

These T system CPUs are more than just integer units, adding to the expectations of stellar functionality. Each chip also includes eight cryptographic accelerators and eight floating point units, in some configurations the systems also have dual 10-Gb ethernet ports. Finally, Logical Domains, or LDOMS, are an included virtualization technology that allows at the maximum a virtual machine per thread. The T systems have won many benchmarking records, including world record single socket SPEC integer and floating point benchmarks. So what could go wrong?
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Why is there such a buzz among the analyst, press, and blogging community that Oracle is going to sell of the Sun hardware business? It makes no sense to me. I shared my thoughts on the acquisition in a previous post, but I am going to elaborate a bit here. Not only do I believe Oracle will continue selling Sun hardware, I think it is the primary reason they bought Sun.

Why would Oracle spend $7.4B to buy Sun? Is it for Solaris? I don’t think so. Solaris is open source and Sun would have welcomed Oracle’s help in tuning the operating system for Oracle’s software applications. Is it for Java? That is a little more plausible, but there was no need for Oracle to control Java. As far as I know, Sun was not doing anything to make it difficult for Oracle to use Java. Oracle is buying Sun for the hardware business. The hardware (and support) business is what generates the revenue at Sun.

I would like to share a few relevant quotes. The first comes from Larry Ellison in a recent interview. He did his best to shut down the rumor mill churning on what will happen to Sun’s hardware business.

Interviewer - “Are you going to exit the hardware business?”

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As promised previously, we’ve posted the second FAQ. The Solaris System Analysis FAQ is now live. The purpose of this FAQ is to provide details on how to determine the cause of a performance, reliability, or functionality problem of a Solaris system. There is a link to the new FAQ in the menu bar on the blog front page. If any of the data is inaccurate, please email. If there is something missing, send the question along and we will take a look at it.

A few weeks ago, it looked like IBM was going to make a deal to purchase Sun. That fell through when the Sun board could not come to agreement. On April 20th, with very little rumor in the marketplace, Oracle announced they were buying Sun for $7.4B in cash. What does this mean for the new company?

• To quote a recent Oracle publication, “Oracle plans to engineer and deliver an integrated system – applications to disk – where all the pieces fit and work together, so customers do not have to do it themselves.” Sun is already shipping Infiniband switches and blades with InfiniBand on the motherboard. They have also mentioned IB is on the roadmap for the Sun 7000. Andy Bechtolsheim mentioned it at the Sun product announcement on April 14th. What about an integrated Oracle appliance running on Nehalem blades, Solaris x64,  Sun 7000 storage, and using Infiniband switches. It should not be a major technology leap to put it all together. What would this mean for the Oracle/HP appliance?
• Sun SPARC processors are at an Oracle pricing disadvantage to IBM Power processors in the current Oracle pricing model. Oracle has never been afraid to use pricing to move the market in their direction. Watch for them to use their pricing model to encourage customer to buy Sun servers.
• Solaris x64 has been intentionally neglected by Oracle. Oracle delivers patches on Solaris SPARC and Linux immediately. Then, they have historically waited up to 6 months to release that same patch for Solaris x64. In the past, this has helped Oracle push their Linux agenda in the marketplace. Given the ease of porting the Oracle patches to Solaris x64, there is no logical technical reason for this lag. Watch for Solaris x64 to become a first class citizen in the Oracle OS support matrix now that growth of Solaris x64 means growth for Oracle.

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I’ll be teaching two days of my Solaris tutorials at the Usenix ATC conference in San Diego during the week of June 15th. Hope to see you there!

Over the course of the next several months, we will be posting a number of FAQs here. The Sun 7000 is the first one to go live. There is a link to the new FAQ in the menu bar on the blog front page. If any of the data is inaccurate, please email. If there is something missing, send the question along and we will take a look at it.

My April 2009 column has been published in ;login: Magazine. This month it’s The Sun Virtualization Guide- making sense of and decisions about the various Sun virtualization options. LDOMs, Containers, Domains and Xen are all options worth considering, and this guide leads you through what each does and when to use them. Some ;login: contents is freely available at ;login:, but my column this month is not one of them. I’ve posted the .pdf here for those without a USENIX membership (although I strongly recommend you get one if you are interested in all things Unix).