Software Crypto Performance

Interesting results - Solaris 10 08/07 (update 4) on v440, no crypto card.

openssl speed rsa1024 -engine pkcs11 -multi N
openssl speed rsa1024 -multi N


Where N was 1 2 4 8



As you can see even without having crypto card there's huge performance increase by using pkcs11 - different algorithm implementation and different compiler?

Data Corruption

CERN has published a paper on data corruption in their data center.
Here you can find some comment and nice summary for those findings.

ZFS

Niagara-2 details

Interesting article on latest UltraSparc-T2 (aka Niagara-2). Definitely worth reading.

SPARC64-VI

Build 74 of Nevada integrates support for 4-core SPARC64 CPU:

Solaris Nevada supports Jupiter CPU for OPL platform.
Jupiter CPU is a 4 core variant of the current shipping
Olympus-C CPU, which has 2 cores.  Both Olympus-C and
Jupiter has 2 CPU strands per CPU core.

Official name for Jupiter CPU is "SPARC64-VII".
Official name for current Olympus-C CPU is "SPARC64-VI".
Official name for OPL platform is "Sun SPARC Enterprise Mx000".

Sun to Acquire Lustre

That is interesting:

Sun Microsystems Expands High Performance Computing Portfolio With Definitive Agreement to Acquire Assets of Cluster File Systems, Including the Lustre File System

Solaris 10 Update 4

After some delays it's finally here - Solaris 10 08/07 (update 4).
Some new features in update 4 below - check for all of them in What's New.

• NSS & nscd enhacements (see Sparks project)
• iSCSI Targer support
• ZFS built-in iSCSI target support (similar to sharenfs)
  
• SATA tagged queuing
• IP Instances for Zones (separate IP stack for zones)
• ability to modify routing, packet filtering, network interfaces within a zone
  
• Zone's resource limits enhacements
• Dtrace support in a zone
• Compact Flash (CF) support - ability to boot Solaris from CF
• NVidia accelerated gfx driver included out of the box