ZFS Deduplication Integrated!

It took more than expected but it has been finally integrated! Read Jeff Bonwick's post on ZFS dedup.

PSARC 2009/571 ZFS Deduplication Properties
6677093 zfs should have dedup capability

You can find code changes here.

Sun/Oracle deal to unravel?

FAQ from Oracle on Sun Acquisition

Apple Abandons ZFS

According to Jeff Bonwick (one of the main developers of ZFS) the real reason is:

> Apple can currently just take the ZFS CDDL code and incorporate it
> (like they did with DTrace), but it may be that they wanted a "private
> license" from Sun (with appropriate technical support and
> indemnification), and the two entities couldn't come to mutually
> agreeable terms.

I cannot disclose details, but that is the essence of it.

Jeff

Solaris 10 on Open Solaris

Yesterday a new zone brand was integrated into Open Solaris: Solaris 10 Zones. It allows running Solaris 10 in a zone on Open Solaris. The technology will be very useful in some instances for enterprise customers once Solaris 11 is out or when deploying Open Solaris. This is very useful if you want to make use of latest hardware platforms and/or technologies delivered in Open Solaris (and Solaris 11 in the future) and you need to migrate your older environments running Solaris 8, 9 or 10 without introducing changes to them (to mitigate a risk or due to lack of resources to do a more detailed validation of a new environment). This is especially true with Open Solaris and Solaris 11 as they are so much different than older Solaris releases. Branded zones are a very neat solution to provide backward compatibility without putting too much hurdle on innovation or having most of the users who do not need it to pay the price of it.

See Jerry's blog entry about Solaris 10 Zones.

Oracle, MySQL, EU and money

The whole MySQL issue with Oracle and EU is just silly. I'm not going to repeat arguments here as there are many comments you can find and I believe that all that could be said about it has already been said. If you are interested in what is going on and why then read these two articles which summarize the whole issue very well. Here is one from Groklaw and this one is also very interesting.

It is really sad to see to what extend some people are greedy...

I think that RMS and Monty lost whatever credibility they had left. They definitely lost it completely in my eyes. Not that Monty cares as he is after more money here... He wants to cash-in two times... Call me idealist or whatever but I honestly believe that life and business is not *only* about money.

zfs set dedup=on

There are two PSARC cases regarding ZFS deduplication which are expected to be approved today.

PSARC 2009/571 ZFS Deduplication Properties
PSARC 2009/557 ZFS send dedup

Hopefully it means that ZFS deduplication will be finally integrated soon.

Sun vs. IBM - Marketing Saga Continues

So Oracle hasn't even bought Sun yet and still there are better marketing campaigns of Sun than Sun ever did.

IBM's Black Magic

Somehow I'm not surprised that comments section is disabled in this example of IBM's Black Magic. I won't comment on it myself as there is no point in repeating Joerg arguments - I agree with him in 100%. This is about recent world record in TPC-C benchmark from Oracle/Sun.

However I would like to suggest to Ms. Stahl that there is another big advantage in IBM's setup she's missed - not only IBM did more tpmC/core but they also did:

• larger number or racks per tpmC
• larger $/tpmC
• larger power usage/tpmC

I think that somehow most customers would consider above three as more important than tpmC/core (assuming they would consider TPC-C relevant in the first place).

TPC-C Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 with Oracle RAC World Record Database Result

Win 10$ Million

I already like the Oracle marketing :)

I only hope that while keeping it aggressive and provocative they won't end-up like IBM with their black magic style benchmarks and comparisons... If anything from Sun's culture will survive the acquisition it is rather unlikely to happen.

300k SPC-1 IOPS from IBM

This is quite impressive result. On the other hand the price per SPC is rather expensive and one wonders why they used a server with 64 cores and used only 48 of them. Is there a technical reason? Anyone knows?

ZFS - What's Coming

The slides.

Exadata v2

Improved stat() performance on files on zfs

Bug ID: 6775100 stat() performance on files on zfs should be improved was fixed in snv_119.
I wanted to do a quick comparison between snv_117 and snv_122 on my workstation to see what kind of improvement there is. I wrote a small C program which does a stat() N times in a loop. This is of course a micro-benchmark. Additionally it doesn't cover a case if doing stat() on not cached entries in DNLC has been improved too.

So I run the program several times on each build after a fresh restart. These were the numbers I was getting on average:

snv_117/ZFS# ptime ./stat_loop test 1000000

real        1.941163151
user        0.219955617
sys         1.707997800

snv_122/ZFS# ptime ./stat_loop test 1000000

real        1.089193770
user        0.199055005
sys         0.889680683

snv_122/UFS# ptime ./stat_loop test 1000000

real        0.905696133
user        0.187513753
sys         0.716955921

This is over 40% improvement in performance of stat() on ZFS - nice.
Still stat() on UFS is faster by about 17%.

The fix could also help some very busy NFS servers :)
AFAIK it has not been backported to Solaris 10 so if you think you need it either go for Open Solaris or open a case with Sun's support and ask for a fix for S10.