AMD CPU Update

Backup Update

If you are planning on upgrading/deploying a backup platform these two (1 2)links could be useful.

Oracle Tuning - I/O and CMT

Some of below links are outdated when it comes to some details but general ideas still hold.

Oracle I/O: Supply and Demand
Direct I/O and Oracle
Direct I/O and Oracle (2)
Oracle and File System Performance
Oracle Built-in Parallelism on Multi CPU/Core Systems
Parallel Index Creation on Multi CPU/Core Systems in Oracle
Parallelizing Oracle Backup with RMAN

Sunset Perceived by geeks

Rock Internals

Tesla - 240 cores

ZFS + SSD

Two interesting posts about ZFS and SSD: 1 2

ps. look for ZFS L2ARC and ZFS SLOG

IP Instancec and CE interfaces

If you need to get ce interface working with IP instances with Zones on Solaris 10 - now you finally can. Go for patch 137086-01.

Snow Leopard

Mac OS Server Edition code named Snow Leopard has been announced and they did include ZFS.

Linus, Jeff and Beer

And the outcome? Well, I guess we have to wait a little bit longer...

uperf - benchmarking network

"Heard of filebench? Want something similar for networking? Look no further! Today we opensourced uperf, a tool to benchmark networking performance. uperf, just like its cousin filebench,¹ is a framework that takes a description of a workload/application (called a profile), and generates load to match the profile. uperf is quite heavily used by the performance groups at Sun to study networking performance."

Read More.

Google Translate Adds New Languages

Google Translate adds 10 new languages, among them is Polish. Read more about it.

ZFS WriteThrottling

ZFS had a problem with properly throttling intensive writers like a simple dd if=/dev/null of=/zfs/file which would usually produce "jumpy" writes instead os steady write stream. There is a new way of throttling in ZFS which should solve the problem - I have not tested it yet. The new code was integrated into build 87. Roch has posted a good explanation of the old and the new behavior.

Scout Thread and Rock

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

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.