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
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?
Read more…
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?”
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?
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).
We’ve rescheduled the sixth NEOSUG meeting for March 11. Dave Miner will talk about the state of OpenSolaris and demo some new functionality, and I’ll talk about what’s new in the Solaris 10 update 6 (11/08) release. Hope to see you there. For full details and registration info have look at the NEOSUG discussion forum.
With the release of the Sun Storage 7000 line of storage appliances, Sun has included a new “Analytics” toolkit. These analytics are based on DTrace (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTrace), but essentially hide the DTrace complexity in a cloak of Ajax-based browser graphics. Through the GUI, a storage administrator can determine which clients are causing which files on the server to be “hot”, or resource use-intensive. Also the administrator can see the latency of each request to the blocks of that file, or how many request of each protocol are being processed, or how many cache hits a file had. In this blog I’ll explore the basics of Analytics.
The analytics component of the Sun Storage 7000 line can provide useful information to a storage administrator who is trying to manage and monitor the appliance and the files and blocks stored there. Just like DTrace, the analytics run in real time, and allow quick progression from hypothesis through data gathering to new hypothesis, data and conclusions. Unlike DTrace, the analytics component has a very complete and useful graphical interface and visualization engine.