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

IBM to distribute Solaris

That's an interesting news. First IBM and Sun started to support Solaris x86 on IBM's x86 blade servers, then HP again started to support Solaris x86 on most of its x86 servers, then early this year Intel joined Open Solaris, and now:

IBM and Sun announced that IBM will distribute the Solaris operating system (OS) and Solaris Subscriptions for select x86-based IBM System x servers and Blade Center servers. Sun President and CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, and IBM Senior Vice President and Group Executive, Bill Zeitler, jointly presented the news during a press conference on August 16, 2007. This news follows Intel's endorsement of Solaris in January. Today, the Solaris OS is supported on more than 820 x86-based platforms and more than 3000 x86-based applications.

Read more.

Also see Jonathan's blog entry on the announcement.

Niagara2

Finally Sun introduced Niagara-2 CPU - see the announcement.

Trusted System with one click?

I've been going thru latest heads-ups for Nevada and found this. In the past we had Trusted Systems which were entirely separate system installs. Then with Trusted Extensions in Solaris 10U3 you could get a Trusted System by just installing your software. Now all is required is a one command... I'm a little bit oversimplifying here of course but still looks like we're getting Trusted Systems features being more and more part of a standard operating system.

DTrace vs. SystemTap

No, no more comparisons - every one who has actually try both just a little bit know it doesn't really make sense to compare them. SystemTap is just another toy noone is using in a production and for a good reasons.
Nevertheless if you are interested in some background of DTrace vs. SystemTap read this blog entry.

Recent ZFS enhancements

Some really nice changes have been integrated in last few builds. Hotplug support is interesting - it will greatly simplify jbod managements with zfs.

• ZFS hotplug
• FMA for ZFS Phase 2
• ZFS Separate Intent Log
• ZFS delegated administration
• ZFS upgrade
• zfs {create,clone,rename} -p

ZFS delegated administration

ZFS makes practically reasonable to give each user a file system. Now what if you want to delegate some ZFS administrative task to that user so for example he/she will be able to create sub-filesystems? It's been integrated into b70.
Check this blog entry for more examples.

Separate Intent Log for ZFS

Ability to put ZIL on a separate device was integrated into b68. So ff you care about ZFS performance see this blog entry.

I wonder if Sun is going to sell x4500 with some kind of nvram or SSD...

Unix Days - Gdansk 2007

Next week there's going to be 3rd edition of Unix Days conference in Poland. We've just opened up public registration. Last year we had to close public registration before even 24h lasted as there're only little above 200 seats available - not all people attend all days and all lectures so we can allow about 300 people to register. We were very happy with last two editions (and thanks to questionnaires we know you were too) and we hope this one will be even better. This year we decided to extend the conference to 3 days comparing to two days last time. This means more presentations to attend. This is also a great opportunity for sys admins to know each other better in real life - especially during evening party to all who attended the conference.

See you there!

UPDATE:

The conference went well - over 260 people were there - good. You can find presentations here - some of them are in English.

NPort ID Virtualization

Aaron wrote:

What do I do all day at the office? Lately, I've been working on adding NPort ID Virtualization (NPIV) to our Leadville FibreChannel stack.

At a high level, you can think of NPIV as allowing one physical FibreChannel HBA to log in multiple times to the SAN, and so you have many virtual HBAs.

Why is this interesting?

The first thing I thought of when I heard about this is hypervisor applications, like Xen. If you have one world wide name per DOMU (in Xen terminology), you can do the same zoning/lun masking that you've always done per server, but this times it's per DOMU.

Another use is that if your HBA breaks, and you have to replace it, you can use the old WWN on the new HBA, and you won't have to rezone your SAN.

More details on NPIV.