John J. McLaughlin: November 2007

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Windows, GNU/Linux grow while Unix stays flat (but undefeated)

According to a Garner, as reported in ComputerWorld, "Unix use remains core in data centers, and while its revenue share is predicted to stay flat for the next five years -- from $16.4 billion this year to $16 billion in 2012 -- Gartner analysts this week said users of major Unix systems from Sun , IBM, and HP have nothing to worry about."

Gartner also expects GNU/Linux to grow from $8.6 billion to $12.2 billion over that same period. If GNU/Linux is really a form of UNIX, that means the UNIX/Linux market will grow to $28.2B by 2012. Windows is expected to grow to $22.2 billion by that same time.

Many GNU/Linux users believe that GNU/Linux usage is under reported in analysts reports as many servers originally shipped with Windows are converted to GNU/Linux servers.

Multi-threading for developers - a webcast

Darryl Gove (compiler performance engineering, Sun Microsystems) delivered an excellent Sun "Hot Topics" webcast. The topics covered are parallelising using Pthreads (POSIX threads) and OpenMP, auto-parallelisation by the compiler, profiling parallel applications. Finally, detecting data races using the thread analyzer.

These topics are covered in less than 15 minutes. The Sun production team shot a video and captured the screen, then mixed and annotating to create a smooth, fast and easy to watch webcast.

Additional "hot topics" videos are also available on Sun's training site.

Sunday, November 25, 2007

Presentations from Sun HPC Consortium 2007

A number of presentations (in PDF format) that were delivered at the 2007 Sun HPC Consortium 2007 are now online.

What is the Sun HPC Consortium?

The Sun High Performance Computing Consortium (SHPCC) is an independent, volunteer-organized, international group of member organizations that own or use Sun computer systems with emphasis on high-performance, technical computing, and visualization.

SHPCC's mission is to provide the high performance computing community with leadership and provide a forum for information exchange to enable the development and effective use of Sun computational tools in achieving the business and research objectives of member organizations.

Presentations

Compute-Power for C²A²S²E: Challenges of an innovative Concept for Aerospace Research

Dr. Alfred Geiger, Head of Solutions & Innovations Scientific & Technical ICT, T-Systems Solutions for Research GmbH

ARSC's New x86_64 Supercomputer

Greg Newby, Arctic Region Supercomputing Center University of Alaska Fairbanks

Lustre – CFS Update

Peter Braam, CEO, Cluster File System

Highly Scalable and Dynamic Grids

Fritz Ferstl, Director Grid Engine Software, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

First Vendor Forum

1.	Totalview Technologies Debugging Code Written for Multi-Core Chip Architectures Chris Gottbrath, Product Manager at Totalview Technologies
2.	Acumem Spotting the Multicore Bottlenecks Erik Hagersten, CEO, Acumem
3.	Clearspeed John Gustafson, Clearspeed
4.	NVIDIA Tesla & CUDA: GPU Compute Solutions for High Performance Computing Patrick LeGresley, Sr. Applied Engineer, NVIDIA

Performance Results for the UltraSPARC T2 Processor on HPC Workloads

Partha Tirumalai, Distinguished Engineer/HPC Ace, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Ruud van der Pas, Senior Staff Engineer/Technical Systems ambassador/HPC Ace, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

UltraSPARC T2 for HPC

Dieter an Mey, HPC Team Lead, RWTH Aachen University, Center for Computing and Communication

ICM Poland: New perspectives and prospects along with Sun C48

Marek Niezgodka/Wojtek Sylwestrzak, Director, ICM

A Secure Attribute-Based Infrastructure for Distributed Computational Environments

Arnie Miles, Senior Systems Architect, Advanced Research Computing Adjunct, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Georgetown University

Solaris for HPC Initiatives

Matthew Baier, Solaris Product Line Manager, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Sun HPC Community Portal Project

Barton Fiske, Senior Technical Marketing Specialist, HPC Systems and Visualization, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Managing Petabytes with SAM-QFS

Bryan Banister, Manager, Storage Systems and Production Servers, Production Systems Dept., San Diego Supercomputer Center, University of California San Diego

Second Vendor Forum

1.	Allinea Software Debugging and Optimizing at Scale Michael Rudgyard, CEO, Allinea Software
2.	The Performance Implications of MPI in Quad Core HPC Dan Caldwell, Vice President, Channels, Scali
3.	Voltaire Powering Wall Street - Market Data Application Acceleration over Solaris Aviv Cohen, Product Management Group Leader,Voltaire
4.	Mellanox InfiniBand Products and Roadmap Gilad Shainer, Senior Technical Marketing Manager

ROCKS and ROCKS on Solaris

Phil Papadopoulos, Program Director, Grid and Cluster Computing Acting Group Leader, Grid Development and Deployment University California San Diego

Network.com

Rohit Valia, Group Product Manager, Network.com

Visualization Software and Solutions, GPGPU Computing Solutions

Linda Fellingham , Advanced Visualization Group, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Ranger: Path to Petascale

Jay Boisseau, Director, Texas Advanced Computing Center

HPC Product Overview

Dr.David Scott, Intel

What's New in the Sun Studio Performance Tools

Marty Itzkowitz, Project Lead for the Performance Analyzer, Sun Microsystems Inc.

Multicore Performance Analysis Tools from Academia

Karl Fuerlinger, Innovative Computing Laboratory, University of Tennessee, EECS Department, USA

Main Features of the upcoming OpenMP 3.0 Specification

Nawal Copty, Project Lead for OpenMP, Sun Microsystems Inc.

Wrap up

Marc Hamilton & Bjorn Andersson, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Sun HPC ClusterTools 7.1

Sun HPC ClusterTools 7.1, an update release based on Open MPI 1.2.4, is now available.( documentation, download).
From the product page:

Sun HPC ClusterTools 7 is the best integrated parallel development environment available on the market today. It enables customers to run their complex, compute-intensive applications on Sun systems and clusters of Sun systems.

From the release notes, the major new features of the ClusterTools 7.1 software include:

Open source MPI (message-passing interface). Previous versions of Sun HPC ClusterTools were based on Sun MPI, Sun’s implementation of the MPI-1 and MPI-2 standards. Sun HPC ClusterTools 7.1 is based on Open MPI, an open-source MPI that is also based on the MPI-1 and MPI-2 standards. Open MPI has been extended to support Sun Grid Engine. Open MPI is delivered through Sun packages.

uDAPL/Infiniband support. ClusterTools 7.1 supports a byte-transfer layer (BTL) capable of communicating over Infiniband networks using the uDAPL protocol.

Improved memory pool usage, which allows the uDAPL BTL to use the same memory pool as other BTLs (including OpenIB). This improvement results in more maintainable uDAPL code, and it allows all BTLs to take advantage of improvements to the memory pool code in the future.

Simplified system administration tasks. Open MPI needs no system-level daemons, so system administrators no longer need to monitor and maintain them.

Support for the Allinea DDT debugger, as well as improved support for the TotalView debugger.

Support for Intel processor-based systems running the Solaris OS as well as SPARC- and AMD-based systems.

Improved I/O forwarding. This allows files larger than 16384 bytes to be redirected to stdin.

Improved performance on large clusters (1000+ nodes).

Saturday, November 17, 2007

Sun at Supercomputing 2007

Sun had a significant presence at Supercomputing 2007 in Reno, NV. The press kit associated with event has a list of highlights and resources including:

Java SE 6 u2 Performance - 75% Better SPECjbb2005

In a recent white paper, "Java SE 6 Performance White Paper", Sun provides an overview of the new performance and scalability improvements in Java SE 6 along with various industry standard and internally developed benchmark results to demonstrate the impact of these improvements.

out-of-the-box SPECjbb2005 - 75% improvement
100% improvement in I/O benhmark
40% VolanoMark improvement
startup time reduced by 15%
memory footprint reduced by 10%

The white paper details of many of the techniques that were used to achive these performance improvemens.

SPECjbb2000 is a benchmark from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC). The performance referenced is based on Sun internal software testing conforming to the testing methodologies listed above. See latest SPECjbb2005 results

VolanoMark™ version 2.5 is a benchmark from Volano LLC .

Friday, November 16, 2007

Most Popular Articles from "System News For Sun Issue Users" Vol 117 Issue 1

Each week, we determine which articles have been most frequently referenced by logged-in subscribers to provide you with a list of the most popular articles for each of the last 4 issues.

Top Ten Articles for Vol 117 Issue 1

Don't Underestimate ZFS [18871]
Myth Buster Jim Laurent Takes on Solaris 10 OS Detractors [18831]
'Best-Ever' Internet Security Practices for Solaris 10 OS [18937]
Sun xVM Hypervisor: A Panacea? [18920]
Solaris Still a Strong Contender in the OS Market [18917]
New World Record Sales and Distribution for SAP on Sun T2 Processors [18919]
Sun's Q1 FY 2008 Earnings Report Posts Profit [18780]
New Riser Cards for Sun Fire V215 and V245 Server [18816]
10GbE Ports on Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120/T5220 [18862]
Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 and GCCfss Tops Competitors on SPEC CPU2006 [18938]

Top Ten Articles for Vol 116 Issue 5

Sun xVM Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Software 1.0 [18868]
Sun's First Storage-Server Hybrid to be Released [18912]
Using Solaris Live Upgrade [18887]
Cost of Ownership: Solaris vs RedHat Linux [18878]
What's in the Pipeline for Storage Products at Sun [18854]
OpenSolaris Developer Preview Ready for Download [18881]
Sun Installation Assistant Easily Installs Linux, Windows OS on Sun x64 Servers [18864]
Creating a Diskless Setup for the Solaris OS on x86 Platforms [18873]
Sun StorageTek IBM LTO4 SCSI for SL500 & L180-700-1400 Tape Libraries [18809]
FileBench Now Included in OpenSolaris [18761]

Top Ten Articles for Vol 116 Issue 4

Solaris 8 Migration Assistant (Project Etude) Now Available [18803]
Sun Plans Countersuit Against Network Appliance (NetApp) [18882]
New Sun Ultra 24 Workstation Powered by Intel's Core 2 Duo and Quad Processors [18869]
Chairman's Office No Sinecure for McNealy [18840]
Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120/T5220 Beat All Single-Chip Results on SPEC CPU2006 [18820]
Sun Fire X4500 (Thumper) Setting World Record Price/Performance Results [18823]
Deploying Sun Java System Directory Server 6.0 as Naming Service for UNIX Clients [18793]
Developing ZFS: A Chat with the Team Leaders [18846]
How to Install Java System Application Server 9.1 (GlassFish V2) in Solaris Zones [18829]
Solaris OS and UltraSPARC T2 Processor [18782]

Top Ten Articles for Vol 116 Issue 3

UltraSPARC T2 Servers Set Floating-Point Single-Chip Record on SPEComp Benchmark [18784]
Download Sun StorageTek Common Array Manager (CAM) 6.0 Free [18830]
Sun UltraSPARC T2 Servers Deliver Highest Single Socket JVM Performance [18783]
Free Download of Logical Domains (LDoms) 1.0.1 [18824]
Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 Posts Industry-Leading Results on Lotus Domino R6iNotes [18822]
Making Storage Think for Itself (or at least for the User) [18700]
Additional Parts Announced for Symantec Veritas NetBackup 6.5 [18804]
Sun Expresses Continued Support of Cluster File Systems Lustre [18800]
Andy Bechtolsheim Talks About Innovating in a Commodity Market [18787]
John Fowler on the Prospects for Sun's Merged Server, Storage Units [18797]

COMSTAR - Solaris as a SCSI (not iSCSI, SCSI) Target

COMSTAR (Common Multiprotocol SCSI Target) allows a server running OpenSolaris to look like a SCSI storage array to another server. Aaron Dailey write about this "disruptive technology" in his blog:

COMSTAR is the last link in being able to create a SCSI storage array using Solaris (actually you could do it before with iSCSI, but COMSTAR is flexible enough to support any transport). With Solaris, you can do RAID in software doing ZFS. CPU cycles are increasing due to multicore technology, especially relative to the speed of disks, so it's realistic to do RAID calculations in software, instead of costly dedicated ASICs. You can attach nearly any kind of disk you want. You have a stable development environment. You can use commodity PC hardware. You want to export some disks as NFS or CIFS, you can do that too. And the code is free, along with a pretty good development environment.

When Project COMSTAR was first announced, Sun's storage software group said:

COMSTAR uses a modular approach to break the huge task of handling all the different pieces in a SCSI target subsystem into independent functional modules, which are glued together by the SCSI Target Mode Framework (STMF). The modules implementing functionality at SCSI level (disk, tape, medium changer etc.) are not required to know about the underlying transport. And the modules implementing the transport protocol (Fibre Channel, iSCSI etc.) are not aware of the SCSI-level functionality of the packets they are transporting. The framework hides the details of allocation, providing execution context and cleanup of SCSI commands and associated resources, and simplifies the task of writing the SCSI or transport modules.

With Solaris, servers are looking more and more like storage arrays. Now it's clear why Sun merged its server and storage group into a "systems group".

Sun Datacenter Switch 3456

Sun has introduced the world's largest InfiniBand core switch, the Sun Datacenter Switch 3456. The total data throughput for the switch is 110,100 Gbps with a port-to-port latency of 700 nanosecond.

This switch supports up to 24 line cards, each with 48 12X iPass connectors. A single cable can connect one 12x iPass port to three 4x Single Data Rate or Double Data Rate (SDR/DDR) Infiniband connectors through a 12x-to-4x splitter cable.

24 cards per switch
* 48 iPass connectors per card
* 3 IB ports per iPass
= 3,456 connections

The Sun Datacenter Switch 3456 can be used to connect lots of Sun Blade servers together with the new Sun Blade 6000/6048 infiniband switched network express module. Twelve blade servers in a 6048 are each provided with two 4x IB through the Switched NEM (24 IB ports in total). Only eight 12x IB connections/cables to the 3456 switch are needed to provide 24 4x IB ports to 12 blades.

Open xVM Website

Sun has launched a new community site for xVM at http://openXVM.org

The into to the site says:

xVM is the intersection of virtualization and management. OpenxVM is a community hub for a number of related open source projects that together create the next generation of data center infrastructure.

By combining virtualization software and data center automation tools, OpenxVM technology provides the technologies to operate data centers at radically reduced costs

There are links to mailing lists, projects, and a blogroll of people who have been writing about xVM.

Steve Wilson writes:

The xVM project at OpenSolaris is developing an industrial-grade, x64 hypervisor using a combination of code developed by the OpenSolaris and Xen communities. The Logical Domains project is building an advanced hypervisor that takes advantage of functionality unique to the newest SPARC microprocessors. Both of these communities are currently active and interested developers and administrators can get access to binaries and source code to try today.

Deconstructing the Security Capabilities of the Solaris 10 OS

Glenn Brunette is a Sun Distinguished Engineer with nearly 15 years experience in information security. Glenn currently works in Sun's Global Sales and Service CTO as the Director and Chief Architect of the GSS Security Office. At a recent Sun event, CEC, he delivered a talk called "Hack-Fu - Deconstructing the Security Capabilities of the Solaris 10 OS."
Glenn says,

The presentation is structured from the viewpoint of a potential attacker examining the system from the network. As each new capability is discussed, barriers are lifted -- one by one -- until the attacker is given root access inside a Solaris 10 non-global zone.

References:

Thursday, November 15, 2007

Web Video of Jonathan Schwartz's Keynote At Oracle Openworld

Jonathan Schwartz delivered a keynote talk, "The Next Wave: Looking Over the IT Horizon", at Oracle OpenWorld 2007. The audio and video, in several formats, of his talk and a PDF of hi s slides are also available on the OpenWorld site. Some of the points raised by Jonathan and Rich Green:

new consumers/content/devices/service on the network create demands on the IT infrastructure that are opportunities for Sun
grown in the network creates demands for new innovations
developers join communities and they like free and open source s/w as they tend not to buy much s/w
The Solaris and Java communities are large and adoption is expanding
The Java Virtual Machine is clearly one of the most successful virtualiztion products of all time
As the cost power continues to increase, the cost of a service is now less that the cost of the power that server will consume
Last year at Oracle OpenWorld Sun announced project blackbox, "the World's first virtual datacenter"
UltraSPARC T1 hep Sun create a business with a run rate of more that $100m/quarter
The new UltraSPARC T2

8 threads, 8 cores = 64 O/S instances on a single chio
Word's most energy efficient CPU
Great for runnings/consolidating Oracle Instances
Built in xVM

Complexity and cost of management is growing
ZFS provides value as it virtualizes storages, leverages commodity disks and eliminates RAID cards and volume managers
"Thumper" - a general purpose computer as the controller for a storage device. With ZFS, manage 24 (soon 48) Tb with ease. With the lustre file system, many Thumpers can be chained together into very, very large filesystems.

Run the database on the storage devices at less that $2/Gb

Free software distributed over the web allows people all around the world to use Sun technology without Sun being involved
Most people who download and use Solaris are not using Sun hardware
Created and opportunity for Sun to work with other vendor who see that customers want Solaris on other platforms - hence Intel, Microsoft and IBM deals with Sun this year

e.g. Microsoft will support Solaris under Windows virtualization and Sun will support Windows under Solaris virtualization

Who else could Sun work with?

Dell
1/3 of people downloading Solaris use Dell servers

Sun xVM is Sun's open Virtualization strategy
Data center challenges include massive scale, extreme cost pressure, eco-responsibility, convergence, unpredictable demand, need for flexibility and choice
Sun xVM: Sun xVM Server & Sun xVM Ops Center
Sun xVM Server

Hypervisor family
Consolidates Windows, Linux and Solaris
Leverages technologies like ZFS, "self healing" FMA, DTrace, Network virtualizition to the benefit of the guest operating systems
Based on Xen and OpenSolaris communities

Sun xVM Ops Center

Physical and virtual resource management
Manage thousands of hardware and software entities
Provision from firmware to hypervisor, O/S and apps
Automated patching
Compliance reporting

Wide range of partners support Sun xVM and more that 1000 systems
Open xVM Community http://openxVM.org

GPLv3

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Sun Blade 6048 Modular System

The Sun Blade 6048 can power, cool and hold up to 48 server blades - the same blades as the Sun Blade 6000 modular system. That includes server blades with AMD, Intel and Sun UltraSPARC CMT CPUs.

Each server blade can have two dedicated PCIe ExpressModules and access to two NEMs for aggregate I/O. The NEM modules provide I/O to all of the server modules in a shelf. (1 and 10 Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel, SAS, InifinBand)

The redundant power and cooling is host-swap and externally accessible. There are 4 shelves which are powered independently.

There is one Chassis Monitoring Module (CMM) per shelf. The CMM provides remote connection to the service processor of each server module and helps provides lights-out manageability of the whole chassis.

See also:

Saturday, November 10, 2007

Video Product Tour of T5120 and T5220 Servers and T6320 Blade Server

Sun has produced a multi-media tours of the new T5120 and T5220 Servers and a similar tour of the Sun Blade T6320 server. Both of these "Interactive System Tours" can be found on the coolthreads page.

The T6320 tour is a single brief video. The tour of the T5120 and T5220 is more elaborate. There is an intro video and the ability to interactively rotate images of the servers. You can select different views, (rear, front or internal), then click on key components and more information will be provided about that component.

Friday, November 9, 2007

Sun Investors approve a 4-for-1 "reverse split"

Sun's investors have approved a 4-for-1 reverse split. This should move the price for a share of Sun stock (symbol JAVA) from the $5 range to the $20 range. A number of large investment funds will not invest in stocks in the $5 range, so the effect of the reverse split should be to make Sun viable option for the managers of those fund.

According to Jonathan , Sun "demonstrated our confidence in the business by buying back a massive $1.25 billion in JAVA shares." Many stock traders place a lot of weight on EPS (earning per share). By improving the earning and reducing the number of shares, Sun is clearly trying to improve its EPS.

ZFS as the Root and Boot File System

Lori Alt from Sun has been working for the last 12-18 months to make ZFS suitable to be the root file systeem. She presented a 37 minute talk based on that work, "ZFS as a Root File System", at the SNIA Storage Developers' Conference.

Issues for a root file system include

boot capability
robustness (e.g. mirroring)
installation support
swap and dump support
management (upgrades, patching, snaphots etc.)

Why ZFS for Root?

pooled storage rather than fixed disk slices
built-in redundancy
great data integrity - no fsck!
snapshots and clones
zvols can be used for in-pool swap and dump

There is a project page for ZFS Boot on the OpenSolaris.org site.

Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Most Popular Articles from "System News For Sun Users" Vol 116 Issue 4

Each week, we determine which articles have been most frequently referenced by logged-in subscribers to provide you with a list of the most popular articles for each of the last 4 issues

Top Ten Articles for Vol 116 Issue 4

Solaris 8 Migration Assistant (Project Etude) Now Available [18803]
Sun Plans Countersuit Against Network Appliance (NetApp) [18882]
New Sun Ultra 24 Workstation Powered by Intel's Core 2 Duo and Quad Processors [18869]
Chairman's Office No Sinecure for McNealy [18840]
Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120/T5220 Beat All Single-Chip Results on SPEC CPU2006 [18820]
Deploying Sun Java System Directory Server 6.0 as Naming Service for UNIX Clients [18793]
Developing ZFS: A Chat with the Team Leaders [18846]
Sun Fire X4500 (Thumper) Setting World Record Price/Performance Results [18823]
Solaris OS and UltraSPARC T2 Processor [18782]
UltraSPARC T2 Server Deployment for Security and High Performance [18785]

Top Ten Articles for Vol 116 Issue 3

UltraSPARC T2 Servers Set Floating-Point Single-Chip Record on SPEComp Benchmark [18784]

Top Ten Articles for Vol 116 Issue 2

Sun xVM Infrastructure Previewed: Sun xVM Server and Sun xVM Ops Center [18756]

Top Ten Articles for Vol 116 Issue 1

Run Windows and Windows Apps on Solaris OS with Win4Solaris [18691]

Monday, November 5, 2007

CIFS Support Added to OpenSolaris Kernel

Recently, Marc Hamilton announced that Sun has integrated Common Internet File System (CIFS), also known as SMB, the standard for Microsoft file sharing services, into Solaris. Marc observes:

By integrating the CIFS server directly into the Solaris kernel, CIFS now becomes a first class citizen in Solaris, and gets tight integration with NFS, ZFS, and Active Directory. Our CIFS implementation is certainly complementary to our work with the Samba community. The advantages of an in-kernel implementation is that we can provide much tighter integration of CIFS with other Solaris features, like ZFS

Bob Porras, engineering VP for Solaris storage in his blog lists recent additions of code and new opensolaris projects including:

Kernel based CIFS server (Build 77). That's right-- designed in as a first class citizen of the os with a kernel based protocol, tightly coupled with NFSv4, VFS, ZFS and Active Directory. Windows Interoperability. Another complimentary open sourced solution along side our friends from the SAMBA community. This service leverages the os and its capabilities. Need infinite snapshots of your CIFS files? Want file compression? Strive for encryption of your data? Not a problem. ZFS provides these data services IN the file system. The kernel based CIFS server source code will post here today. Need help with source code management tools click here.

Alan Wright has a detailed post that explains some of the details and history behind the project. He comments:

Windows interoperability also requires that a server support various Windows services, typically MSRPC services, and it is very sensitive to the way that those services behave: Windows interoperability requires that a CIFS server convince a Windows client or server that it "is Windows". This is really only possible if the operating system supports those services at a fundamental level.

And that's the goal of this large project. ( Over 800 files, approximately 370,000 lines of code, including 180,000 lines of new code)

Sunday, November 4, 2007

ZFS Screencasts

In June 2007, Paul Venezia, senior contributing editor at InforWorld, posted a 10 minute screen cast in which he sets up ZFS on a SunFire x4500 ("Thumper"). (ZFS has become available on Mac OS "Leopard" and the FreeBSD 7.0-CURRENT snapshot sinse Paul made the screencast.)

PJD, the man behind ZFS porting on FreeBSD, has produced a number of ZFS screencasts which have been posted to youtube:

The image quality on the youtube videos is not great. There are some better quality flash screencasts on the opensolaris.org site:

Self Healing with ZFS
Brief and simple demo of the basics of using ZFS including making 100 mirrored filesystems in 5 minutes

Sun in Florida : Solaris and Java Developers Update Nov 13, 14, 15

Sun Microsystems will be hosting events in the Tampa, Orlando, and Fort Lauderdale area for developers who use Solaris and/or Java to create software. The 2-hour sessions will be held at Sun's office locations. They will include lunch with Solaris and Java experts presenting up-to-date tools, tips, and techniques.

AGENDA:

11:00 AM To 12:00 PM Solaris - Bob Netherton
12:00 PM To 1:00 PM Java - Jeff Bounds

Saturday, November 3, 2007

OpenSolaris Community: Storage

In a recent blog entry, Jonathan Schwartz said, "in our view, computers are storage devices, and vice versa". That comment was not just about ZFS. Look at the OpenSolaris Storage Community page on opensolaris.org; Sun has an impressive storage platform which is almost all open sourced.

The OpenSolaris Storage Community describes is goals as:

Build an active community of administrators and developers to improve and extend the OpenSolaris storage environment.
Enable the development of OpenSolaris storage appliances.
Connect OpenSolaris source code activities with open standards efforts in the storage industry.
Support developers creating new OpenSolaris storage capabilities.
Support developers porting existing storage applications to OpenSolaris.

Project Indiana Presentation by Dave Minor

Dave Miner (Sr. Staff Engineer, Solaris Installation, Sun Microsystems) delivered a presentation on Project Indiana to the New England OpenSolaris User Group (NEOSUG), He has made the slides from that presentation available in PDF and ODF formats.
Here is his one slide summary of what is Project Indiana?

An OpenSolaris binary distribution
Single Live CD with installation capability
New packaging system with public repositories
Modernized user environment
100% re-distributable under OpenSolaris Binary License
A base distribution on which to build distro's
Focus on attracting new developers - great user experience and best open-source software

Friday, November 2, 2007

OpenSolaris Developer's Preview (Project Indiana)

Sun and the OpenSolaris community have made a public preview of 'Project Indiana' available for download. The preview is a CD image and the software is for X86 and X64 platforms. Dennis Clarke of blastwave.org has a blog entry with the official announcement and lots of nice screen shots of starting and running the OpenSolaris Developer Preview.

Here's an extract from the announcement:

The first milestone of Project Indiana is now available - called OpenSolaris Developer Preview.

It's available for download at http://dlc.sun.com/osol/indiana/downloads/current/in-preview.iso

This is an x86-based LiveCD install image, containing some new and emerging OpenSolaris technologies. This may result in instabilities that lead to system panics or data corruption. Among the features contained in this release are

Single CD download, with LiveCD 'try before you install' capabilities

Caiman installer, with significantly improved installation experience

ZFS as the default filesystem

Image packaging system, with capabilities to pull packages from network repositories

GNU utilities in the default $PATH

bash as the default shell

GNOME 2.20 desktop environment
For more details about the system requirements along with some basic user documentation, see - http://opensolaris.org/os/project/indiana/resources/getit/ and the release notes http://opensolaris.org/os/project/indiana/resources/rn/

John J. McLaughlin