c0t0d0s0.org - General

links for 2009-01-05

nospam@example.com (del.icio.us) — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 12:00:11 +0100

Munich OpenSolaris User Group (MUCOSUG)

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 16:45:45 +0100

Es ist eine interessante zeitliche Koinzidenz, denn ich wusste nichts von dem Vorhaben, in Muenchen eine OSUG auf die Beine zu stellen, und ich glaube auch nicht, das die Münchener Kollegen davon wussten, das ich ähnliches für Hamburg angedachte habe, da ich vornehmlich im Hamburger Umfeld darueber diskutiert habe. Die Zeit scheint irgendwie reif fuer das dedizierte Netzwerken in der Solaris-Userschaft zu sein.

Sei es drum: Am 12.1. findet in der Sun Geschäftsstelle in München das erste Treffen der Munich OpenSolaris User Group statt. Für weitere Informationen konsultiert bitte die Webseite der MUCOSUG. Die Ankündigung des ersten Events findet ihr ebenfalls dort.

Happy new year!

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 11:46:03 +0100

As the first of my readers enter 2009 in a few minutes (e.g. the readers in New Zealand), i want send some greetings from my side:

Andy at the 9th ICFA seminar

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 18:26:32 +0100

Andy held a presentation at the 9th seminar of the International Comitee of Future Accelerator: The Solid State Storage Revolution. The pages 25 and 26 are especially interesting.

PS: Other topics were Neutrino factory and muon collider R&D or X-band high-gradient and CLIC R&D for future colliders and other strange stuff like that ...

Hohlräume

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 19:53:34 +0100

Interessanter Kommentar von Norbert Bluem zur aktuellen Wirtschaftskrise im Hamburger Abendblatt:

Die gegenwärtige Wirtschaftskrise bietet manche Erfahrung, aus der man klüger werden kann: Keiner der großen ökonomischen Koryphäen des Neoliberalismus' hat die Krise kommen sehen. Die etablierte Wirtschaftswissenschaft hat sich blamiert bis auf die Knochen. Der "Chefökonom" der "Bild", Professor Sinn, das Beste, was die Zunft offenbar bieten kann, im Nebenberuf Generallobbyist der Privatisierung des Sozialstaates, gab noch Mitte des Jahres Prognosen von sich, die so treffsicher waren wie eine Wettermeldung in New Orleans gewesen wäre, die beim Ansturm von Katrina eine Schönwetterperiode angekündigt hätte.

und

Ökonomische Blasen sind virtuelle Hohlräume, die mit nichts anderem als mit Erwartungen gefüllt sind. Mit den Realitäten von Arbeit und Wertschöpfung haben sie so viel zu tun wie Wetten mit Leistung.

Best wishes

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 09:08:47 +0100

I´m driving to my parents in a few hours from now. I´m already packing my bags for a few days at the moment. But i won´t leave Hamburg without sending you my best wishes for Christmas! I hope you will have some quiet and stress-free days with your loved ones!

Road to Death Valley

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 16:13:17 +0100

New scrub

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 05:43:24 +0100

One of the annoying things at zfs was the restart of the scrub when you take an snapshot while the scrub runs. This issue was fixed some builds ago, but Matthew Ahrens published an interesting article about the fixed code yesterday: New Scrub Code

We have solved a nasty bug by rewriting the scrub code to do its work in syncing context, visiting datasets in order from oldest to newest. I had to introduce a few new on-disk data structures so we can quickly determine this order. And there are a few operations that the scrub code needs to know about and account for. This work lays a bunch of infrastructure that will be used by the upcoming device removal feature. Stay tuned!

Solaris at Microsoft?

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 13:05:07 +0100

There is an interesting comment at Slashdort. Sadly it´s an anonymous comment ...

BitTorrent is an excellent intranet content-distribution tool; we used it for years to push software and content releases to 600+ Solaris servers inside Microsoft (WebTV).

Yesterday

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 22:24:31 +0100

There are days that feel like used ones. Somebody already took the best parts out of it and left only the bad ones. Yesterday was such a day. To start my meetings at a normal time in Dresden (normal time for the customers, the fact that i´m coming from Hamburg isn´t the problem of the customer) i have take the 06:30 am flight. Check-in is closing at 06:00, urban train to airport starts at 05:31, so i have to leave at 05:20. I need a little bit less than an hour from deep sleep mode to fully operational so my alarm clock wakes me at 04:30. This isn´t much of a problem for me, as i´m waking up between 05:00 and 06:00 in any case ... so it´s just one hour less sleep. Nevertheless i like this hour ... and i like to stay in bed drinking tea, reading news and often my first mails for the job are written in my bed.

Continue reading "Yesterday"

Opensolaris at Heise

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 14:34:50 +0100

Nice ... Opensolaris on the home page of Heise.de, one of the largest IT-news portals in germany:

8 socket benchmarking revisited

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 10:09:57 +0100

The fight for the best 8 socket benchmark in SAP is in it´s second round. In the left corner ... HP "the inventing garage" ProLiant DL785 G5 with an fighting weight of 72 kg or 160 pounds. The system presents:

HP ProLiant DL785 G5, 8 processors / 32 cores / 32 threads, Quad-Core AMD Opteron Processor 8384, 2.7 GHz, 128 KB L1 cache and 512 KB L2 cache per core, 6 MB L3 cache per processor, 128 GB main memory

It runs SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and Oracle 10g.

In the right corner ... Sun "The revenge of Andy" Sun Fire X4600M2 with an fighting weight of 40kg or 88 pounds. The Sun system is equiped with:

Sun Fire X4600M2, 8 processors / 32 cores / 32 threads, Quad-Core AMD Opteron Processor 8384, 2.7 GHz, 128 KB L1 cache and 512 KB L2 cache per core, 6 MB L3 cache per processor, 128 GB main memory

The system is powered by Solaris 10 and MaxDB 7.6

After fighting the following results were gathered from the fighting judges: Sun X4600M2 with 39,270 SAPS and 7,825 SD users (Certificate: 2008070). The HP was able to gather 35,400 SAPS and 7,010 SD users. (Certificate: 2008064).

The winner by a clear margin: Sun "The revenge of Andy" X4600M2! It should be noted that the Sun system already used the extra soft boxing gloves called "unicode" , whereas HP used the old and outdated boxing gloves "non-unicode". There is already an discussion raging about the usefulnes of results based on those old gloves. Albeit there deliver more punch you can´t use it in more and more fights in the real world.

Okay, fun aside: This benchmark result is interesting, albeit you can´t use this result to compare both machines. In the last benchmark the system HP system used Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition and SQL Server 2008. The HP system just had 88.24 percent the performance of the Sun System. In this benchmark the HP system had 90,15 percent of the Sun performance. Two different operating systems, two different databases ... but a similar difference? It´s just a speculation ... but maybe the HP implementation of 8 sockets is vastly less efficent. Why vastly? You have to remember, that unicode costs you 15% performance. It would be nice to see a result for the ProLiant DL785 G5 with 6.0 unicode, Solaris 10 and MaxDB to get a clearer view to the issue.

Update: I digged down into this benchmark. Albeit i have still no hard proof for my thesis, the operating systems or the database seem to be just minor factors to the SAP benchmark. I summarized my findings in "Sun X4600M2 vs HP ProLiant DL785 G5 revisited".

Flagday for Crossbow

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 18:21:46 +0100

One of the most interesting upcoming features of Solaris found it. The first parts of the results of PSARC/2006/357 Crossbow - Network Virtualization and Resource Management were integrated yesterday into Opensolaris Build 105.

Crossbow provides the building blocks for network virtualization and resource control by creating virtual stacks around any service (HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, NFS, etc.), protocol (TCP, UDP, SCTP, etc.), or Virtual machine (Containers, Xen and LDom based hypervisor xVM virtual machines).

As you can see from the year in the ARC case number, it´s one of the large projects at Opensolaris, as it was under steady development since that time. You will find more information at the projects webpage on opensolaris.org.

Guided tour through new features in Opensolaris 2008.11

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 09:01:37 +0100

Roman Strobl created a screencast for the new Opensolaris 2008.11 release. Really worth a look.

More than 250.000 NFS IOPS

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 07:43:07 +0100

Brendan Gregg did an interesting benchmark with our new storage systems to show what an 7410 single-head can deliver: A quarter million NFS IOPS. This number was generated with a benchmarking configuration - 1 byte blocksize. This isn´t really realistic - it´s just for benchmarking. But he delivers a more meaningful result in his text, too:

I've reached over 145,000 NFSv3 read ops/sec - and this is not the maximum the 7410 can do (I'll need to use a second 10 GigE port to take this further). The latency does increase as more threads queue up, here it is plotted as a heat map with latency on the y-axis (the darker the pixel - the more I/Os were at that latency for that second.) At our peak (which has been selected by the vertical line), most of the I/Os were faster than 55 us (0.055 milliseconds) - which can be seen in the numbers in the list on the left.

Redundant I/O domains with LDOMS

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 20:36:14 +0100

An commentator at this article stated, that you don´t have redundant I/O servers. My colleague Martin Mueller pointed me at the Immersion Week to a fact that i wasn´t really aware of (albeit it´s obvious when you read the documentation, i just didn´t really thought about this topic): It´s perfectly possible to configure a redundant I/O domain with LDOMS (albeit there it´s not possible on every LDOMS capable server)

Most of the UltraSPARC T-class based systems have multiple PCIe busses. It´s a valid configuration to boot up two I/O domains and giving both of them one of the PCIe busses. When one of the I/O domains fails, it´s still capable to use services reachable by the other domain. There is even a good blueprint about such configurations - LDOMs I/O Best Practices: Data Reliability with Logical Domains

PS: This is one of the two things i´ve learned in Jena. About the other thing i´m not allowed to talk ... the "Stay tuned" in Jonathans talk at CEC makes much more sense now ...

The last week ...

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 13:30:00 +0100

I wasn´t ill last week nor i´ve lost the drive to blog last week.

I was really busy with listening at day and create/pimp presentations in the evening. Last week was the Immersion Week of Sun Germany. Immersion Week (iwsungy) ? The iwsungy was an event for the technical people in presales. 5 days full of presentations and workshops. Information exchange galore. I think, we have to thank Winnie and Detlef for this event. It was really great. I´ve learned a thing or two, and i hope the listeners of my presentations learned a thing or two, too.

I´m on my way home now.Major blogging activities will resume tomorrow morning ...

Outsourcing mal anders

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 01:30:46 +0100

Mit einem freundlichen Gruss an die Schweizer Kollegen, die eine Reihe vor mir im "Emerging Technologies"-Track sitzen : Der Präsident der Sicherheitskommission des Ständerates hat vorgeschlagen, das man das Air Policing der Schweiz an groessere Länder (beispielsweise Deutschland) outsourcen koennte.

Eigentlich eine gute Idee, wenn man bedenkt, was moderne Kampfflugzeuge in Anschaffung und Unterhalt kosten sowie der Unwahrscheinlichkeit in zwischenstaatlichen Konflikten genutzt zu werden. Die Realitaet ist: Man bekommt nicht mal eine einheitliche europäische zivile Luftraumüberwachung hin .... wo Raketen im Spiel sind, geht das natuerlich noch viel weniger ...

Behind the scenes of the Fishworks development

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 19:28:00 +0100

Bryan Cantrill put together some thoughts and anecdotes about the development of Fishworks in Fishworks: Now it can be told. He writes in regard of the dtrace based appliance analytics:

So not only does analytics bring the power of DTrace to a much broader spectrum of technologists, it also -- thanks to the wonders of the visual cortex -- has much greater utility than just DTrace alone. (Or, as one hardened veteran of command line interfaces put it to me, "this is the one GUI that I actually want to use!")

ACK!

SunCEC2008 - Day -1: Death Valley

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 16:09:40 +0100

SSDs for Mysql

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 18:12:24 +0100

The usage of SSDs has an really big impact on the performance of mysl. Kazuho Oku wrote about his experiences with the Intel X25-M ssd in "Benchmarking SSD for MySQL". Looks really promising.

25 Jahre c't

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 19:07:58 +0100

Dieser Tage ist die c't 25 Jahre alt geworden. Auch aus meiner Richtung ein "Herzlichen Glückwunsch!" nach Hannover. Ich bin zwar immer noch der Meinung das die c't nicht mehr den Glanz alter Tage hat, dennoch muss ich mich bei dieser Zeitschrift eigentlich bedanken: Ich habe mir meine erste Ausgabe der c't vor vielen, vielen Jahren (über 20, um genauer zu sein ... ich war damals 14) in Oldenburg gekauft. Tagesausflug mit der Klasse. Ich glaube Aufführung im Staatstheater und anschliessend Auslauf in der Fussgängerzone der Stadt. Meine Erinnerung ist da ein wenig verwaschen. Aber an eines erinnere ich mich noch genau ... in dieser Ausgabe wurde ein System getestet, das auf einem Prozessor der 680x0er Baureihe von Motorola basierte. Der Hersteller: Sun Microsystems.

Mark Papermaster

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 09:11:53 +0100

There was much hassle in the media about the part-time job of Andy at his new company. I think IBM has a bigger problem: It looks like they will totally loose an really important person :

Until recently, Papermaster was IBM's vice president of microprocessor development and had been at the company for 26 years.[...]
According to the complaint, Papermaster informed IBM that he'd accepted a senior executive position at Apple that involves working closely with CEO Steve Jobs, providing technical and strategic advice

Whereas Andy will still work for Sun on a part-time basis, this looks like a large area of scorched earth, as IBM and Papermaster are already in lawsuit mode about the new job at Apple. Papermaster is important for IBM, as he was the guy who oversaw the development of Power proccesor line and recently the development of IBMs blades.

CRM bei der Bahn

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 20:35:59 +0100

Also irgendwie muss die Bahn noch ein wenig an ihrem CRM System arbeiten. Ich habe meine Nachfolge-Bahncard im Abo erhalten:

[...] natuerlich mit allen exklusiven Vorteilen, von denen nur unsere besten Kunden profitieren. Denn ab sofort geniessen Sie den bahn.comfort Status"

Hmm ... find ich ja auch toll das ich in die Lounge darf ... aber ab sofort ... ich glaube ich bin schon seit 2003 in diesem Frequently-Delayed-Programm ....

Outright depressing ....

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 21:07:22 +0200

The good thing ... we´ve still more than enough money to get through the financial crisis and i wouldn´t wonder, if we still have positive cash flow .... (besides of effects like stock buy backs)

Nokia Sports Tracker Beta

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 16:17:47 +0200

One of the nice features of my new Nokia E71 mobile is the integrated GPS receiver. So i searched for a tool to use it as a GPS tracking device for geotagging of photos. I found such a tool ... it´s even from Nokia. This tool was developed for tracking sport workouts, but it allows you to export your tracks as GPX or KML files as well, so you can use it for photo geotagging (for people like me).

Yesterday evening i´ve decided to walk from cinema to home instead of using the subway and played around with the tool. You can directly upload at home. You can even activate "Life Tracking" so other people can look at your workout while you are at workout. I didn´t use this feature. I´m not a fan of this kind of exhibitionism and obviously it´s a security risk. It tracks speed, altitude, position and allows you to look at some analytic screens while tracking (for example time/speed, time/altitude and similar graphs)

You can share your tracks with friends of with anyone. I opened up the track from the picture above for everyone, so you can take a look at the data collected by the tool. The application for your mobile and additional informations are available at the website of the Nokia Research Center

The Register about future SPARC developments

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 20:26:10 +0200

TPM wrote an article about some comments of Sun and Fujitsu executives and enriched it with some speculations - Sun and Fujitsu hint at Sparc futures:

As part of the launch of the Sparc T5440 midrange server this week in San Francisco, top brass from both Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu spent some time assuring customers that the companies' chip and systems partnership going strong and that both were working away on Sparc processors that would end up in future systems.

Heise.de über die Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 13:23:36 +0200

heise.de hat einen sehr wohlwollenden Artikel über unsere neuen Server auf Basis des UltraSPARC T2+ prozessors veröffentlicht: Suns Enterprise-Server T5440 mischt die Szene auf:

Mit dem neuen Vierprozessor-Server SPARC Enterprise T5440 stellen Sun und Fujitsu unter Beweis, dass mit der SPARC-Architektur in der Serverwelt weiterhin zu rechnen ist.

und

Mit solchen Ergebnissen haben Sun und Fujitsu eine gute Chance, verloren gegangenes Terrain im HPC- und Supercomputer-Bereich wieder zurück zu erobern.

John Cleese: Michael Palin isn´t the funniest Palin anymore

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 08:33:54 +0200

(via: Egghat)

Credit default swaps - oder wie kamen die Riesensummen zustande ...

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 07:51:28 +0200

Ein Kommentar beim Rebellmarkt erklaert, wie diese absurden Summen an ausstehenden CDS zustande kommen: Die Magie der CDS. Dieser Kommentar erklaert den Irrsinn ziemlich gut.