Triple-Parity RAID and Beyond

Adam Leventhal wrote an interesting article about the future of RAID.

My Presentation at LOSUG

Yesterday I did a presentation at London Open Solaris User Group on the backup platform I implemented. It utilizes open source technologies like Open Solaris, ZFS, RSYNC and a commodity hardware to effectively offer us a better backup solution than NetBackup and for a fraction of a cost. You can download the slides here. Before you do so it might be worth reading my two previous blog entries: 1 2 which should provide some additional background.

Read-Only Boot from ZFS Snapshot

PSARC 2009/670

Allow for booting from a ZFS snapshot.  The boot image
will be read-only.  Early in boot a clone of the root
is created and used to provide writable storage for the
system image during its lifetime.  Upon reboot, the
system image will reset to the same previous state.

Sun Cluster 3.2 11/09

What's New:

• Solaris Volume Manager Three-Mediator Support
• Oracle Automatic Storage Manager (ASM) on HA-Oracle and Oracle RAC
• SWIFTAlliance Access and Gateway 6.3
• Outgoing Connection Support For Scalable Services
• IPsec Security Association (SA) Failover for Scalable Services
• Campus Cluster With Hitachi Universal Replicator
• Sun Cluster HA for LDoms Guest Domains
• Generic Affinity for Scalable Services
• Round-Robin Load-Balancing Scheme for Scalable Services
• SCTP Support in Scalable Services
• Maintaining Solaris Systems with Solaris Live Upgrade and Update on Attach
• Sun Storage J4200/J4400 SATA Arrays

VirtualBox 3.1 Released

This version is a major update. The following major new features were added:

• Teleportation (aka live migration); migrate a live VM session from one host to another (see the manual for more information)
• VM states can now be restored from arbitrary snapshots instead of only the last one, and new snapshots can be taken from other snapshots as well ("branched snapshots"; see the manual for more information)
• 2D video acceleration for Windows guests; use the host video hardware for overlay stretching and color conversion (see the manual for more information)
• More flexible storage attachments: CD/DVD drives can be attached to an arbitrary IDE controller, and there can be more than one such drive (the manual for more information)
• The network attachment type can be changed while a VM is running
• Complete rewrite of experimental USB support for OpenSolaris hosts making use of the latest USB enhancements in Solaris Nevada 124 and higher
• Significant performance improvements for PAE and AMD64 guests (VT-x and AMD-V only; normal (non-nested) paging)
• Experimental support for EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface; see the manual for more information)
• Support for paravirtualized network adapters (virtio-net; see the manual for more information)