Sun Microsystems’ server revenue climbed almost 14 percent since the second quarter last year, pushing Sun ahead of Dell in the rankings. What is Sun’s winning strategy?
Solaris on Opteron
Sun picked up what other vendors like IBM and HP long treat as secondary to Intel Xeon. With the acquisition of Kealia in early 2004, Sun set its sights on creating usefully-differentiated AMD Opteron-based systems.
After two years, Sun now offers from a single-chassis eight-socket server to a four-socket blade that is solely about heavy-duty data center infrastructure to the ultimate Sun Fire X4500 direct-attached storage, all taking standard volume components.
These are computing commodities. Sun is open to put anything on it should the market requires. Combining Sun’s quality with the cost effective volume components, it finally gets out of the deadlock of staying unique and passionate about computers and offering them at a competitive market price.
Success: Become a player in the computing commodities.
Mr. Cantrill came up with the general idea for DTrace in 1996, while he was a computer-science student at Brown University, but didn’t get to start work on it until late 2001. It took nearly three years for him and his team — Michael Shapiro, a Sun distinguished engineer, and Adam Leventhal, a staff engineer — to make it work; a final version shipped early last year as part of Sun’s Solaris 10 operating system.
Where most debugging takes place as software is being developed, DTrace analyzes problems with systems that are in production — running a company’s database, say, or executing stock trades. It does this with a process called “dynamic tracing,” which enables a developer or systems administrator to run diagnostic tests on a system without causing it to crash. Before DTrace, such tests often took days or weeks to reproduce the problem and identify the cause. With DTrace, performance problems can be tracked to their underlying causes in hours, even minutes.
It is time to get serious about DTrace folks. Sun has provided quite a number of guides to get you started. You can find the official resources at BigAdmin DTrace and also enough examples to get you excited at Brendan Gregg’s Homepage.
via WSJ
Roch Bourbonnais at Kernel Performance Engineering, Sun Microsystems reckons ZFS is not quite ready for the prime time. The result shows an increasing better performance on each ZFS build and is not far from a super tuned UFS.
To achieve acceptable performance levels:
The latest ZFS code base. ZFS improves fast these days. We will need to keep tracking releases for a little while. The current OpenSolaris release as well as the upcoming Solaris 10 Update 3 (this fall), should perform for these tests, as well as the Build 44 results shown here.
UFS/DIO : 100 %
UFS : xx no directio (to be updated)
ZFS Best : 75% best tuned config with latest bits.
ZFS S10U2 : 50% best tuned config.
ZFS S10U2 : 25% simple tuning.
UFS (with DIO) has been heavily tuned over the years to provide very good support for DBMS. We are just beginning to explore the tweaks and tunings necessary to achieve comparable performance from ZFS in this specialized domain. We knew that running a DBMS would be a challenge since, a database tickles filesystems in ways that are quite different from other types of loads.