World Class Storage from Sun Microsystems

John Fowler, EVP, Systems, Jon Benson, Senior VP, Storage for Systems delivered a talk called, "The New Value Equation for Storage: Innovating to Accelerate Growth", at the Sun Analyst Summit 2008. PDF slides are available. (1 hour and 12 minutes, 39 slides)

Jon summarizes Sun's position ("Why Sun Will Win") on one of the last slide thus:

• Sales Opportunities
• Growth in storage market
• Server/storage attach
• Existing install base
  
• Market Dynamics
• Datacenters are running out of space, energy and budget
• Volume of content is increasing (Web 2.0, mandated retention, etc.)
• Efficient content retrieval mandated by compliance
• Customer acceptance of alternatives to vendor lock-in
• Unsustainable storage economics
  
• Sun's Approach
• Open
• Innovation
• Breakthrough Economics
  

During the presentation, Jon cited some facts to support his statement that Sun's "Storage Momentum Continues":

• 2nd straight quarter of Y/Y Storage Products revenue growth
• Grew disk billings 7% Y/Y Q2FY08 vs. Q2FY07
• First in UNIX disk storage systems unit shipments (IDC, 12/07)
• 16 consecutive quarters
• First in the total tape automation- enterprise market (IDC,1/08)
• Three consecutive quarters of share gain in enterprise tape drives
• Highest growth rate (>40%) for midrange storage for disk storage systems Q3CY07/Q3CY06 among leading vendors (IDC, 12/07)

Some "Little Known Facts About Sun Storage":

• The leading provider of tape for Web 2.0 companies
• Backing up 12 of the 20 fastest supercomputers in the world
• First and only open-source key management system for encryption
• Unique software innovation in tape, disk, and OS areas (CAM, ELS, SLM, SAM/Q, ZFS, etc.)
• Fastest growth rate in midrange storage among leading vendors
• Midrange arrays ranked #1 in quality two years in a row (Storage Magazine)
  
• SL8500 holds >80% market share in enterprise environments with libraries greater than 1000 slots (IDC)
  
• Sun Fire X4500 (“Thumper”) shipped >70,000 Tb of storage in a single year—more than any single product from EMC of NetApp
  
• 36% of the world’s archived data resides on Sun
  

Jon gives and example where Nationwide Insurance converted from

• 9 Tape libraries (9310, 9740, 9710)
• 75 tape drives (T9940A, T9840A)

to

• 3 Tape libraries (SL8500, L700E)
• 2 Sun VTLs
• 40 tape drives (T9940B, T9840B)

Saving: $945k over three years

• 75% reduction in maintenances costs
• 70% less datacenter space
• 60% less energy use
• 99% reduction in oracle recovery time

Sun is very focused on an "Open Storage" and intends to bring to the traditional storage market the same kind of disruption that "Open Systems" brought to proprietary systems.

Linuxworld Picks Top Leaders in Open Source Business

IDC is forecasting that the Open Source business, "reached $1.8 billion in 2006 and will grow to reach $5.8 Billion by 2011". LinuxWorld has published an article,"2008's Top Leaders in Open Source Business", in which they list the open source business leaders who they think will matter the most in 2008:

• Marten Mickos - CEO, MySQL AB
• Andy Astor - CEO, EnterpriseDB
• John Roberts - CEO, SugarCRM
• Larry Augustin - Private Investor
• Jonathan Schwartz - CEO, Sun Microsystems
• Matt Asay - VP of Business Development, Alfresco
• James Governor, Stephen O'Grady, Michael Coté
• Raven Zachary - Research Director, The 451 Group
• William “whurley” Hurley - Chief Architect of Open Source Strategy, BMC
• Anthony Gold - VP and GM, Open Source Business, Unisys
• Michael Tiemman - President, Open Source Initiative

Over the last few years, there have been a number of large Open Source deals:

1. Sun buys MySQL, $1 billion, 2008
   MySQL - the world’s most widely used open source database.
2. Red Hat buys Cygnus Solutions, $675 million, 1999
   Cygnus Solutions was a provider of open source software support
3. Citrix buys XenSource, $500 million, 2007
   XenSource, is the company behind the Xen virtualization software.
4. Yahoo buys Zimbra, $350 million, 2007
   Yahoo already have their own email services, and with Zimbra they got an integrated email, messaging and collaboration software.
5. Red Hat buys JBoss, $350 million, 2006
   Red Hat strengthened their SOA offerings by buying the JBoss Java application server.
6. Novell buys SUSE, $210 million, 2003
   Novell got their own Linux distribution by buying SUSE.
7. Nokia buys Trolltech, $153 million, 2008
   Trolltech is the company behind the Qt GUI framework which is used by the popular Linux desktop environment KDE.

Sun's Reference Architechure for Oracle 11g

Sun and Oracle have been working together for over 25 years. Each company tries to takes full advantage of the other's technology. A few months ago, Sun published a white paper, "SUN’S REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE FOR ORACLE 11g GRID", (October 2007), that shows how Sun's technology can be used to create a horizontally scalable grid for database application deployment:

Sun’s Reference Architecture for Oracle 11g Grid delivers a robust, scalable, and manageable database platform that maintains or increases customer service levels with a low TCO. The architecture provides an optimal combination of cost savings, superb performance, and high availability with its ultimate value being the ability to synthesize these individual elements into an integrated architecture that can be managed with ease.

Some of the Sun technology used in this reference architecture:

• Solaris 10
• Sun Fire x64 (AMD and Intel) servers
• Solaris Cluster Advanced Edition for Oracle RAC
• Comprised of Sun StorageTek QFS software, Solaris Cluster RAC agent, and Solaris Volume Manager software
  
• InfiniBand technology
• Sun N1 System Manager Software

The paper finishes with a summary:

Sun’s Reference Architecture for Oracle 11g Grid is a portfolio of Sun and third-party products designed to reduce the risks, uncertainty, and costs associated with implementing an Oracle database within a grid computing environment. Designed, tested, implemented, and tuned at the Sun Competency Center for Oracle in Menlo Park, California, the reference architecture consists of recommended, integrated hardware and software stacks for a proven grid database solution. Along with this architecture, Sun provides a best practices framework for obtaining optimal performance, availability, and resiliency.

The most compelling benefits of Sun’s Reference Architecture for Oracle 11g Grid come not from the individual components, but from the ability to integrate complementary elements — whether they come from Sun or another vendor. The combination of Sun Fire x64 servers with AMD Opteron processors and Cisco InfiniBand technology ensures higher database throughput, while the adoption of Solaris Cluster Advanced Edition for RAC enhances the reliability and availability of Oracle RAC 11g. The result is a solution that can help deliver the highest service levels and satisfy the most demanding business requirements of a database grid.

Details on "Rock"

Sun has been developing a high-end SPARC processor with the codename Rock. One of Sun's top engineers Marc Tremblay, delivered a paper at the ISSCC 2008 conference where he confirmed that Rock based systems would ship in the "second half of 2009".

A brief technical summary of Marc Tremblay's ISSCC presentation is available on ars technica under the title, "Sun: Can you smell what the Rock is cookin'?". ... 16 cores (32 threads) ... 2.3GHz ... 250W ... scout threads ... speculative execution ...

"A Third-Generation 65nm 16-Core 32-Thread Plus 32-Scout-Thread CMT SPARC Processor "
Marc Tremblay, Shailender Chaudhry

Sun Analyst Summit 2008

Every year Sun puts on a major event for financial analysts. By carefully explaining Sun's strategy, technology, products and it's view of the market, Sun hopes that the analysts will understand why Sun is relevant and they should recommend that their clients invest in Sun.

Sun puts a huge effort into this event and to their credit they realized a few years ago that they should share this conference via the web. Here is the agenda:

Welcome: Overview and Objectives (5 minutes)
Anil Gadre, EVP, Chief Marketing Officer

Growing at the Center of the Network Economy (50 minutes)
Jonathan Schwartz, CEO and President

Sun's Financial Outlook, FY08 (50 minutes)
Mike Lehman, Chief Financial Officer

Executing on Growth (60 minutes)
Don Grantham, EVP, Global Sales & Services

Q&A for Financial Analysts (95 minutes)
Jonathan Schwartz, Michael Lehman

Building Network-Scale Computing (60 minutes)
Greg Papadopoulos, CTO, EVP of R&D

Sessions: Systems, Virtualization, Eco Innovation

Sessions: Software, Constellation System, Eco Innovation

Sessions: Storage, Virtualization, Solaris

PDF Slides are available for the general sessions and the breakout sessions.

Sun xVM Server and Ops Center Q&A with Steve Wilson

virtualization.info has posted an interview with Steve Wilson, "Sun xVM Server and Ops Center Q&A with Steve Wilson".

Some of the key points that Steve makes in the interview are:

• Sun is a player in the virtualization space
• Sun xVM Server includes a number of datacenter-grade features borrowed from Solaris that give xVM Server a set of highly unique attributes such as predictive self healing
• xVM Server will be able to run VM files which were created for VMware's ESX Server or Microsoft's Hyper-V without modification
• xVM Ops Center is designed to manage up to thousands of servers (physical and virtual)
• xVM Ops Center will be available freely under the very liberal GNU Public License (GPL) version 3
• Sun is planning to provide the ability to use Solaris Cluster together with xVM Server for applications where true clustering is required
• Ops Center 1.0 includes support for patching of Solaris (x86 and SPARC) as well as several versions of Redhat and SuSE Linux. Windows patching support will be added in a future revision
• xVM Server includes a simple to use, self-patching system that can automatically download and install the newest patches
• xVM Ops Center will ship in the next few weeks, ahead of the first commercial release of xVM Server
• xVM Ops Center 1.0 is focused on datacenter automation and includes features such as:

• Server discovery and inventory management
• Server firmware analysis and provisioning
• Bare metal Server provisioning
• Patch management
• Monitoring

• xVM Server, and an update to xVM Ops Center to go with it, are planned for Q2 of calendar year 2008. Specific features to manage virtualized environments, include:

• Full virtual guest life cycle management
• Management of the domain 0 instance
• Monitoring, management and provisioning of Windows, Linux and Solaris guests
• Migration capabilities (Live, Regular and Cold)
• Simple single host management through direct browser access, as well as large scale multi-node management via xVM Ops Center
• Expansive resource monitoring and analysis
• Guest image storage library management
• Virtual and resource pooling
• Network virtualization and bandwidth management

• Both xVM Server and xVM Ops Center will expose API sets through WS-Management. Sun will be putting specs out for this over at http://openxvm.org shortly

See also:

• Sun xVM Ops Center at sun.com
• Steve Wilson video on YouTube (2:30)
  
• Steve's blog
• Sun's (beta) Wiki pages for Sun xVM
• xVM weblog at blog.sun.com
  

Solaris 10 has been Shipping for Three Years

Solaris 10 has now been shipping for three years. In addition to the initial release, which began shipping January 2005, there have been four more releases. The current release, "Solaris 10 8/07" or "Update 4", has been in production for 5 months.

To say that Solaris 10 has been successful would be an understatement. The award winning technical features, the support for a large number of hardware platforms and the process of becoming Open Source via the OpenSolaris project have all contributed to that success. The large number of Solaris 10 downloads (11m+) and OEM agreements with IBM and Dell further validate that success. It is clear that Solaris is and will remain a major operating system for the foreseeable future.

Most of the new hardware platforms that Sun is now shipping requires Solaris 10:

• UltraSPARC T1 and T2 based servers (e.g. T2000 and T5120)
  
• Sun Blade Servers (e.g. Sun Blade 6000 modular system)
• AMD Opteron based servers (e.g. Sun Fire X4100, Sun Fire X4600)
• Intel Xeon based servers (e.g. Sun Fire X5150)
  
• "M" Series SPARC64-VI based servers (M4000, M5000, M8000, M9000)

While there are still some servers that are shipping which support Solaris 9, it is anticipated that by the end of 2009, all new Sun servers will require Solaris 10.

Solaris 8 and 9 customers who have not yet upgraded to Solaris 10 will find that the many benefits of the new environment will outweigh the costs of upgrading. Simply replacing old servers with new can result is savings of space, power and cooling. As there is strong ISV support for Solaris 10 and Sun provides the Solaris Application Guarantee, most customers should find the move to Solaris 10 straightforward.

With the appropriate Solaris 10 and Sun hardware features (e.g. resource management, Solaris Containers, dynamic system domains and LDoms), many old servers can be consolidated into a smaller number of new servers resulting in even greater savings of cost, space, power and cooling.

Many IT organizations find that a large migration project can be a technical and business challenge:

• Perform an analysis of an existing Solaris 8/9 environment
• Define a new Solaris 10 environment that leverages the new software and hardware features
• Write a detailed project plan to implement then migrate to the new environment
• Continue to provide services while executing migration plan
  

If you are making the transition from Solaris 8/9, here are a few more things to consider:

• In any non-trivial migration, there will be problems - plan for them
• Be prepared to troubleshoot unexpected performance differences (DTrace can help)
  
• Become familiar with tools like Solaris 8 Migration Assistant as a backup/transition aid
• Consider leveraging data center automation tools (such as Sun Connection and Sun Management Center) to improve productivity

Any time you make a significant change to your IT environment, there are other core IT infrastructure considerations that may complicate your migration plans:

• security and auditing
• disaster recovery and business continuity
• backup and recovery
• networking
  
• storage management
• processes and procedures (ITSM)
• monitoring and management
• capacity and performance management
  
• O/S, application and firmware patch management
  
• maintenance contract management, asset tracking, ....

If you have a lot of time and available staff, you can set up a lab and experiment with the new tools and technology. If you don't then you should leverage an experienced partner who can "teach you how to fish".