Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Scout Thread and Rock

Interesting article on upcoming Rock CPU focused mostly on Scout Thread technology.

Friday, April 18, 2008

Nevada New Features

Some selected by me new features in last several builds up-to build 88
  • New mega_sas driver which supports the LSI SAS1078 SAS RAID Storage Adapters and Dell PERC 5/E, 5/i, 6E, 6/i and CERC 6/i RAID Controllers
  • Project Brussels has been integrated - standarized and easy way to configure network interfaces (no more custom ndd scripts, etc.)
  • 3D driver for ATI Radeon
  • xVM - aka XEN has been integrated
  • NEw native CIFS server
  • CIFS client inegrated
  • Default router for a Zone
  • DTrace NFSv3 Provider
  • DTrace NFSv4 Provider
  • ZFS L2ARC
  • ZFS cachefile property (quicker imports for large SANs)
  • ZFS zpool failmode
  • Several network and wifi drivers have been integrated

Of course there is much much more.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

128 Virtual CPUs in 1U

Sun has revealed two new Niagara servers: T5140 and T5240. Both of them have two UltraSparcT2+ processors which gives you 16 physical cores in a system with 128 threads in total. T5240, which is 2U version, also allows you to put up-to 16 SAS disks and up-to 128GB of memory - wow!

Prices - recently Sun re-priced old Niagara systems and now you can buy T5240 with 2x Niagara for the same price you could buy old 1x CPU Niagara system just a week ago - cool.

While T2+ has slighlty faster memory controllers but it has only two of them per CPU instead of four in T2... I wonder how it will impact performance.

Couple of technical blogs on new servers: 1 2 3 4

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Solaris Cluster 3.2 U1

Change log:

Core enhancements:
  • Support for Logical Domains
  • Support of EMC SRDF in a campus cluster configuration
  • Support for Sun StorageTek NAS storage
  • 8 nodes cluster configuration with x64 servers
  • Support for Veritas File System on x64 servers
  • Service Tags
  • GUI enhancements
Geographic Edition enhancements:
  • Support for Oracle RAC 10g/11g with EMC SRDF & HDS TrueCopy
  • Support for HDS TrueCopy on X64 servers
  • Support for EMC SRDF/S on X64 servers
  • Support for Solaris Containers
New supported applications and agents:
  • Oracle 11g RAC supported with Solaris Cluster on SPARC
  • New applications version supported
  • Support for Solaris Containers for Linux and Solaris 8 in HA Container Agent