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Friday 30 December 2011

Press Review #6

By Julien Gabel on Friday 30 December 2011, 18:20 - Solaris

Here is a little press review around Oracle technologies, and Solaris in particular:

Oracle Solaris Crash Analysis Tool 5.3 now available

The Oracle Solaris Crash Analysis Tool Team is happy to announce the availability of release 5.3. This release addresses bugs discovered since the release of 5.2 plus enhancements to support Oracle Solaris 11 and updates to Oracle Solaris versions 7 through 10.

Hard Partitioning!

Since December 2, LDoms count as "Hard Partitioning". This makes it possible to license only those cores of a server with Oracle software that you really need.

Announcing Release of Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.0!

Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.0 offers the best availability for enterprise applications with instant system failure detection for fastest service recovery. It includes out-of the box support for Oracle database and applications such as Oracle WebLogic Server and is pre-tested with Oracle Sun servers, storage and networking components. It is optimized to leverage the SPARC SuperCluster redundancy and reliability features and delivers the high availability infrastructure for the Oracle Optimized Solutions.

OCSvsVCS.png

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 Certified on Solaris 11

Oracle Solaris 11 was announced last week, and I'm pleased to also announce that Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 is now certified on Oracle Solaris on SPARC (64-bit).

LDoms networking in Solaris 11

The network stack for Oracle Solaris 11 has been substantially re-architected in an effort known as the project Crossbow. One of the main goals of Crossbow is to virtualize the hard NICs into Virtual NICs (VNICs) to provide more effective sharing of networking resources. The VNIC feature allows dividing a physical NIC into multiple virtual interfaces to provide independent network stacks for applications.

How low can we go ? (Minimised install of Solaris 11)

I wondered how little we can actually install as a starting point for building a minimised system. The new IPS package system makes this much easier and makes it work in a supportable way without all the pit falls of patches and packages we had previously.

Oracle Solaris Studio 12.3 Launched!

Oracle Solaris Studio 12.3, Oracle's advanced C, C++ and Fortran development tool suite, accelerates application performance up to 300% on Oracle Systems, provides extreme application observability and enhances developer productivity. Oracle Solaris Studio 12.3 is optimized for Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating systems.

Disgruntled employee? Oracle doesn't seem to care about Solaris 11 code leak

The source code for Oracle's Solaris 11 operating system is now out in the open for anyone to peruse and compile, thanks to a furtive posting of a compressed archive that has been mirrored across scores of bitstreams and filesharing sites. But so far, Oracle hasn't moved to do anything about it, and the question remains whether the code was leaked by a disgruntled Oracle employee, or if this is the strangest open-source code-drop in history.

The Rise of Engineered Systems

The point is:
Building IT systems is complicated, time-consuming, error-prone, unpredictable, resource-intensive, expensive and risky.

Or, more shortly:
The way we build IT today is broken.

That's what Oracle’s Engineered Systems are about.

How to Install and Configure a Two-Node Cluster

Using Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.0 on Oracle Solaris 11

How to quickly and easily install and configure Oracle Solaris Cluster software for two nodes, including configuring a quorum device.

The case of the un-unmountable tmpfs

Every once in a rare while our development machines encounter an fatal error during boot because we couldn’t unmount tmpfs. This weekend I cracked the case, so I thought I’d share my uses of boot-time DTrace, and the musty corners of the operating systems that I encountered along the way. First I should explain a little bit about what happens during boot and why we were unmounting a tmpfs filesystem.

2000x performance win

I recently helped analyze a performance issue in an unexpected but common place, where the fix improved performance of a task by around 2000x (two thousand times faster). As this is short, interesting and useful, I’ve reproduced it here in a lab environment to share details and screenshots.

Flame Graphs

Determining why CPUs are busy is a routine task for performance analysis, which often involves profiling stack traces. Profiling by sampling at a fixed rate is a coarse but effective way to see which code-paths are hot (busy on-CPU). It usually works by creating a timed interrupt that collects the current program counter, function address, or entire stack back trace, and translates these to something human readable when printing a summary report.

Profiling data can be thousands of lines long, and difficult to comprehend. Flame graphs are a visualization for sampled stack traces, which allows hot code-paths to be identified quickly and accurately.

Visualizing Device Utilization

Device utilization is a key metric for performance analysis and capacity planning. In this post, I’ll illustrate different ways to visualize device utilization across multiple devices, and how that utilization is changing over time.

As a system to study, I’ll examine a production cloud environment that contains over 5,000 virtual CPUs (over 600 physical processors).

Coming Soon: My Oracle Support Next-Generation User Interface

My Oracle Support will receive a new user interface built using Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF). The new interface is designed to deliver faster, more streamlined access to support information and services. The upgrade will bring immediate benefits and also establish a new, state-of-the-art platform for service innovation over time.

More thoughts on ZFS compression and crash dumps

Thanks to Darren Moffat for poking holes in my previous post, or more explicitly pointing out that I could add more useful and interesting data. Darren commented that it was a shame I hadn't included the time to take a crash dump along side the size, and space usage. The reason for this is that one reason for using vmdump format compression from savecore is to minimize the time required to get the crash dump off the dump device and on to the file system.

Oracle Solaris 11, Aimed at Cloud Deployments, Enhances Network Virtualization

December 07, 2011 - IDC Link

Although customer updates have been shipping to customer sites for many years, this was the first major release of Solaris in seven years — and the first major release since Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems in January 2010. Following a beta program that began in 2010, there were more than 750 customers with Solaris 11 in production at launch.

Oracle Solaris runs on the Oracle SPARC hardware systems and on x86 server systems (systems based on Intel or AMD x86 microprocessors). Oracle sees this dual-platform approach as a differentiator from the two other major Unix operating systems, IBM AIX and HP-UX 11 v3, which run on POWER and Itanium systems, respectively, but not on x86 architecture. […] This dual-platform support, with SPARC and x86, gave Solaris a bigger footprint in datacenter through the early 2000s and helped sustain the full portfolio of 11,000 Solaris ISV applications.

Oracle has expanded the functionality of Solaris with Oracle Solaris 11 — adding new features related to virtualization and cloud computing. There is a very short list of vendors that show this kind of continued investment in operating systems — including Microsoft (Windows); Red Hat (Linux); and the two leading Unix competitors, IBM and HP.

SPARC T4 Server eBook

The Oracle ACE Program Newsletter| December 2011

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Thursday 1 December 2011

Press Review #5

By Julien Gabel on Thursday 1 December 2011, 16:27 - Solaris

Here is a little press review around Oracle technologies, and Solaris in particular:

Oracle Delivers On SPARC Promises With New T4 Processors And Systems

This is a major milestone for Oracle and its server community. The virtues of the SuperCluster aside, it is the first tangible product of their commitments to a renewed investment in SPARC processor technology, and as such, it looks impressive. It retains the highly threaded throughput-oriented architecture of the T-series, and makes major improvements in single-threaded performance, which was a weakness in previous generations of T-series technology. But most importantly, it is early, laying to rest the ghosts of previous disasters at Sun and Oracle, validating not only Oracle’s intentions but their ability to execute with this new stream of CPU architectures.

CloudSigma invites Solaris to frolic on its cloud

CloudSigma, an infrastructure cloud operator based in Zurich, is letting customers run Solaris and the ZFS file system on its cloud, giving it full peer status with Linux and Windows operating systems.

Robert Jenkins, CloudSigma CTO, tells El Reg that the company is not putting servers using either Sparc64 or Sparc T series processors into its clouds. However, the company will let the x86 version of Solaris 10 run around its cloud and play alongside of myriad Linux and Windows distributions.

The System Developer's Edge, by Darryl Gove

Selected Blog Posts and Articles

The Developer's Edge was envisioned as an almanac for developers, something that gathered together a set of useful resources that could be dipped into, referred to, or read cover-to-cover. The book was never intended as the only location where the information resided, however some of the content is no longer available elsewhere, making it fortuitous that it has been captured here.

While the main body of text has not been changed, the book has been updated to the Oracle brand. The title has changed to include the word "systems", to target the intended audience more clearly.

Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c: Complete, Integrated and Business-Driven Cloud Management

Everyone is now talking about cloud and most of the IT vendor has latched on to the Cloud promise. Traditional systems management vendors are no exceptions. However, in most cases, Cloud is treated as a technology fashion, the newest buzzword in the ever changing landscape of enterprise technology.

EM12c.jpg

This whitepaper delves into what really makes an enterprise Cloud. It covers the complete cloud life cycle and how Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c offers a complete, integrated and business-driven cloud management.

Engineered and General Purpose Systems

The virtues of Oracle's engineered systems, news about which came to the fore at Oracle OpenWorld2011, are discussed by Jeff Savit's blog post Engineered and General Purpose Systems, where he stresses the economy to the user of Oracle's integrated approach in saving customers time spent on the "non-revenue generating efforts" involved with designing and configuring enterprise systems. Because Oracle's engineered systems are designed to be optimal for a particular workload class, validated and proven by Oracle to be reliable, simple to purchase, configure and manage, and have dramatically superior performance for their target purpose. Furthermore, Savit notes, these systems are built on industry-standard components rather than rare or exotic chips, in order to take advantage of price/performance advances. So, while there will always be a niche at least for general purpose systems, the advantages of the engineered system will prove compelling in most instances, Savit predicts.

Replacing the Application Packaging Developer’s guide

The guide is a lot shorter than the old book – currently 56 pages, as opposed to the 190 pages in the document it replaces. Some of this is because of the fewer examples we have, but also we don’t have to write about patch creation, complex postinstall or class-action scripting or relocatable packages. IPS is simpler than SVR4 in many ways, though there is a learning curve, which this book aims to help with.

The SPARC T4 servers are here!

The M-Series are designed with Mainframe-class RAS features (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability). They are based on the Sparc64-VII+ CPUs, excelling at single threaded performance.

The T-Series are the CoolThread servers, with the CMT (chipmultithreading) design, they are designed to run heavily parallel workloads, concentrating on throughput, running up to 512 threads actively at the same time, if desired.

The latter category just got a brand new update, let's see, what makes the T4 special.

Completely disabling root logins on Solaris 11

Password (PAM) caching for Solaris su - "a la sudo"

User home directory encryption with ZFS

Immutable Zones on Encrypted ZFS

OpenSSL Versions in Solaris

HOWTO Turn off SPARC T4 or Intel AES-NI crypto acceleration

Here are a few technical blog entries stacked up using new security capabilities of Solaris 11:

  1. Completely disabling root logins on Solaris 11
  2. User home directory encryption with ZFS & PAM
  3. Password caching for Solaris su
  4. Immutable Zones on Encrypted ZFS
  5. OpenSSL Versions in Solaris
  6. HOWTO Turn off SPARC T4 or Intel AES-NI crypto acceleration

Oracle VM vs. VMware vSphere Cost Calculator

This online calculator let you experiment with different scenarios and see the total cost of ownership in real world dollars for various solutions.

Oracle Solaris 11 Engineered for Oracle VM Server Virtualization

Oracle Solaris 11 was announced today. Oracle Solaris 11 is engineered for Oracle VM sever virtualization on both x86 and SPARC based systems, providing deployment flexibility and secure live migration.

Solaris 11 DTrace syscall Provider Changes

Oracle Solaris 11 dropped many commonly used probes from the DTrace syscall provider, a disappointing side-effect of some code refactoring in the system call trap table (PSARC 2010/441 “delete obsolete system call traps”). This breaks a lot of scripts and one liners, including many that are used to teach beginners DTrace. Functionality is still (I think) possible, albeit by learning trap table mappings and tracing those.

What's new on the Solaris 11 Desktop?

Much has been written today about the enterprise and cloud features of Oracle Solaris 11, which was launched today, but what's new for those of us who just like to have the robustness and security of Solaris on our desktop machines? Here are a few of the Solaris 11 desktop highlights.

UNIX - Dead or alive?

The extinction of UNIX is not going to happen in our lifetimes

Looking to the future of UNIX, Fichera predicts vendors will offer improved scalability in both hardware and software; and that there will be improvements in oline maintenance and availability, along with improved partitioning and in systems management tools as well. None of these developments, it hardly need be said, could take place without sufficient marketplace interest in UNIX. Fichera is confident that it exists and will continue. He also expects continued interest in UNIX from Oracle, IBM and HP.

The IPS System Repository

Some packages in the zone always need to be kept in sync with those packages in the global zone. For example, anything which delivers a kernel module and a userland application that interfaces with it must be kept in sync between the global zone and any non-global zones on the system.

Performing a pkg update from the global zone ensures that all zones are kept in sync, and will update all zones automatically (though, as mentioned in the Zones administration guide, pkg update will simply update the global zone, and ensure that during that update only the packages that cross the kernel/userland boundary are updated in each zone.)

SPARC T4 OpenSSL Engine

The SPARC T4 microprocessor has several new instructions available to perform several cryptography functions in hardware. These instructions are used in a new built-in OpenSSL 1.0 engine available in Solaris 11, the t4 engine. These new crypto instructions are different from previous generations of SPARC hardware, which has separate crypto processing units./p>

Solaris X86 AESNI OpenSSL Engine

The Intel Westmere microprocessor has six new instructions to accelerate AES encryption. They are called "AESNI" for "AES New Instructions". These are unprivileged instructions, so no "root", other elevated access, or context switch is required to execute these instructions. These instructions are used in a new built-in OpenSSL 1.0 engine available in Solaris 11, the aesni engine.

My New Favorite Tool: Oracle VM VirtualBox

This article explains how I used Oracle VM VirtualBox to save time when testing database installation procedures. Oracle VM VirtualBox proved to be an incredibly useful tool because I could easily create multiple OS installation test cases as well as snapshot my progress at various points along the way.

Virtually the fastest way to try Solaris 11 (and Solaris 10 zones)

If you're looking to try out Solaris 11, there are the standard ISO and USB image downloads on the main page. Those are great if you're looking to install Solaris 11 on hardware, and we hope you will. But if you take the time to look down the page, you'll find a link off to the Oracle Solaris 11 Virtual Machine downloads. There are two downloads there:

  • A pre-built Solaris 10 zone
  • A pre-built Solaris 11 VM for use with VirtualBox

Critical Threads Optimization

The hardware is providing mechanisms to dynamically resource threads according to their runtime behavior.

We're very aware of these challenges in Solaris, and have been working to provide the best out of box performance while providing mechanisms to further optimize applications when necessary. The Critical Threads Optimization was introduced in Solaris 10 8/11 and Solaris 11 as one such mechanism that allows customers to both address issues caused by contention over shared hardware resources and explicitly take advantage of features such as T4's dynamic threading.

Solaris 11 : les nouveautés vues par les équipes de développement

Pour ceux qui ne sont pas dans la liste de distribution de la communauté des utilisateurs Solaris francophones, voici une petite compilation de liens sur les blogs des développeurs de Solaris 11 et qui couvre en détails les nouveautés dans de multiples domaines.

Sparc M4 chips etched by Oracle, not Fujitsu

In a briefing with El Reg to discuss the Solaris 11 launch, we pointed out that while the logical domain (LDom) partitioning technology on the Sparc T series was good and competitive with anything in the RISC/Unix and x86 server spaces, the dynamic domain hardware partitions used in the Sparc Enterprise M machines were a little bit rigid by comparison and that Oracle had to do something to bring LDoms to the future M4 processors.

Solaris 11 Customer Maintenance Lifecycle

This new blog is all about the Customer Maintenance Lifecycle for Image Packaging System (IPS) based Solaris releases, such as Solaris 11. It'll include policies, best practices, clarifications, and lots of other stuff which the writer hope you'll find useful as you get up to speed with Solaris 11 and IPS.

Let's start with a version of its Solaris 11 Customer Maintenance Lifecycle presentation which he gave at this year's Oracle Open World and at the recent Deutsche Oracle Anwendergruppe (DOAG - German Oracle Users Group) conference in Nürnberg.

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Saturday 19 November 2011

Forum Oracle : Transformation du Data Center, l'innovation par l'intégration

By Julien Gabel on Saturday 19 November 2011, 14:26 - Solaris

I had the great opportunity to assist to the french event Forum Oracle : Transformation du Data Center, l'innovation par l'intégration, which took place in Paris last Tuesday, November 8, 2011.

Follow the slides corresponding to this event.

Title: Changing the Game by Simplifying I.T.

Speaker: Olivier Brot, Senior Sales Director Hardware BU Country Leader

URL: http://www.oracle.com/us/dm/h2fy11/1-olivier-brot-intro-1368628.pdf (fr) (1,5 MB)

Title: The Oracle Story

Speaker: John Abel, Chief Technology Architect; EMEA Server and Storage

URL: http://www.oracle.com/us/dm/h2fy11/2-john-abel-oraclestory-1368637.pdf (en) (5,8 MB)

Title: Datacenter Transformation with Oracle Engineered Systems

Speaker: Dario Wiser, Head of Datacenters & Servers, HW Business Development EMEA

URL: http://www.oracle.com/us/dm/h2fy11/3-dct-keynote-1368643.pdf (en) (2,7 MB)

Title: Comment construire votre Cloud avec Oracle ?

Speaker: Eric Bezille, CTO Oracle HW Business Unit France

URL: http://www.oracle.com/us/dm/h2fy11/4-eric-bezille-dct-pvt-cloud-key-1368654.pdf (fr) (1,3 MB)

Title: Oracle Exadata Database Machine & Oracle Exalogic

Speaker: Denis Martin, Exadata Business Development Manager; Antonio Ferreira, Architect Software

URL: http://www.oracle.com/us/dm/h2fy11/5-denismartin-ant-fer-exa-exalogic-1368666.pdf (en) (3,5 MB)

Title: New Engineered Solutions : BigData et Exalytics pour anticiper l’explosion de nos données

Speaker: Pascal Guy, Architecte groupe EMEA Expert Server

URL: http://www.oracle.com/us/dm/h2fy11/6-pascal-guy-new-eng-sol-1368670.pdf (en) (1,5 MB)

Title: Déploiements rapides, performants et sécurisés des applications avec la nouvelle génération des systèmes SPARC

Speaker: Jean-Yves Migeon; EMEA Oracle HW Business Development; Eric Bezille

URL: http://www.oracle.com/us/dm/h2fy11/7-ericbezille-jym-supercluster-1368680.pdf (fr) (2,6 MB)

Title: Transformative Oracle Storage Solutions For Datacenter Consolidation, Virtualization and Cloud

Speaker: Jacques Villain, Principal Sales Consultant, EMEA Long Term Storage TEAM

URL: http://www.oracle.com/us/dm/h2fy11/8jacques-transformative-storage-1368634.pdf (en) (2,5 MB)

Title: Présentation ALTARES: Optimisation du Datacenter

Speaker: M. Christophe Le Caignec, Directeur Système et Sécurité Informatique, ALTARES

URL: http://www.oracle.com/us/dm/h2fy11/9altares-c-lecaignec-1368648.pdf (fr) (0,2 MB)

Title: Realize The Full Potential of Your Application Infrastructure with Oracle’s Virtualized Systems

Speaker: Christophe PAULIAT, Sales Consultant, Hardware BU

URL: http://www.oracle.com/us/dm/h2fy11/10-christophe-servervirtualization-1368683.pdf (en) (1,2 MB)

Title: Total Cloud Control with Oracle EM 12c

Speaker: Alain Scazzola, Business Development Manager

URL: http://www.oracle.com/us/dm/h2fy11/11alain-scazzola-em12c-1368695.pdf (en) (4,4 MB)

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Tuesday 15 November 2011

Oracle Solaris 11 Launch Highlights

By Julien Gabel on Tuesday 15 November 2011, 18:17 - Solaris

Here is a little press review around the launch of Oracle Solaris 11:

Oracle Solaris 11 How to Articles

  1. Installation
  2. System Configuration
  3. Network Management
  4. Software Management
  5. Virtualization
  6. Development

Oracle Solaris : 11 New Things You Need To Know (Flash Video)

Recent Benchmarks Using Oracle Solaris 11

The following is a list of links to recent benchmarks which used Oracle Solaris 11.

  1. SPARC T4-2 Delivers World Record SPECjvm2008 Result with Oracle Solaris 11
  2. SPARC T4-4 Produces World Record Oracle OLAP Capacity
  3. SPARC T4-2 Server Beats Intel (Westmere AES-NI) on ZFS Encryption Tests
  4. SPARC T4 Processor Beats Intel (Westmere AES-NI) on AES Encryption Tests
  5. SPARC T4 Processor Outperforms IBM POWER7 and Intel (Westmere AES-NI) on OpenSSL AES Encryption Test
  6. SPARC T4-1 Server Outperforms Intel (Westmere AES-NI) on IPsec Encryption Tests
  7. SPARC T4-2 Server Beats Intel (Westmere AES-NI) on SSL Network Tests
  8. SPARC T4-2 Server Beats Intel (Westmere AES-NI) on Oracle Database Tablespace Encryption Queries

UNIX 03 Product Standard Conformance

Oracle Solaris 11 is certified on SPARC and X86-based platforms as conforming to the UNIX 03 product standard, effective November 8, 2011, per The Open Group.

Oracle dubs Solaris 11 world's 'first cloud OS'

'Absolutely spanking' IBM and HP

More importantly, the delay is the result of Oracle's desire to fully leverage the Sparc processor, the Solaris operating system, and the Oracle stack of database, middleware, and application software as a highly tuned system with a better system for testing and patching software in the entire stack as it changes and thereby allowing Oracle to command a premium for Sparc-based systems because they are easier to operate and support.

This is, of course, the old AS/400 value proposition that IBM has been selling its midrange customers for more than two decades. The difference now is that Oracle actually believes it, and IBM, which makes a lot more money selling services to integrate piece parts and support them than selling its Power Systems running the integrated IBM i software stack, can't afford to.

Fowler opened up his technical review of Solaris 11 by reminding everyone that Solaris had more deployments than HP-UX and AIX combined, and added that "operating systems are something that only improve over time."

Fowler said that Solaris 10, which was launched in January 2005, would be getting its own updates soon and would, in fact, be supported on future Sparc T5 and M4 systems due next year.

On roadmaps for the past year and a half, Fowler has shown that Oracle's long-term goal is to deliver in late 2014 or early 2015 a machine that has 64 sockets with a total of 16,384 threads and supporting 64TB of main memory.

Oracle Solaris 11: The First Cloud OS

Oracle Solaris 11 is the first operating system engineered with cloud computing in mind. We believe you should expect more from your OS -- especially as you start considering public, private and hybrid clouds for enterprise-class workloads.

And what's most important: all of this is integrated, engineered and optimized to work together: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It's the power of this that makes Oracle Solaris unique.

S11 X11: ye olde window system in today's new operating system

Today's the big release for Oracle Solaris 11, after 7 years of development. For me, the Solaris 11 release comes a little more than 11 years after I joined the X11 engineering team at what was then Sun, and finishes off some projects that were started all the way back then.

In total, we recorded 1512 change request id's during Solaris 11 development, from the time we forked the “Nevada” gate from the Solaris 10 release until the final code freeze for todays release - some were one line bug fixes, some were man page updates, some were minor RFE's and some were major projects, but in the end, the result is both very different (and hopefully much better) than what we started with, and yet, still contains the core X11 code base with 24 years of backwards compatibility in the core protocols and APIs.

The most inviting Solaris 11 features - Part I, Boot Environments

"Having been involved in various projects around the upcoming Solaris 11 release, we had the possibility to compile a list of features we assume UNIX Engineers will find to be cornerstones of Solaris 11 based platforms. It wasn't easy to keep the list short, due to the sheer amount of innovation and the tight integration of the new- or updated technologies in this Solaris release.

We have planned a series of blog posts with a short preview of each Solaris 11 technologies in the list, in a Question and Answer form."

This is the first post, featuring Boot Environments.

Solaris 11 Released As Cloud Virtualisation OS

The delayed release has been much-anticipated because Solaris still matches the combined user base for HP-UX and AIX, Oracle executive vice president of systems John Fowler claimed. However the transition from Sun to Oracle has hit the server division quite hard and Oracle is no doubt hoping that the new OS release will help turn the tide.

Oracle Solaris Goes to 11

Solaris, a Unix implementation, was originally developed by Sun Microsystems, which Oracle acquired last year. While not as widely known for its cloud software, Oracle has been marketing Solaris as a cloud-friendly OS. In Oracle's architecture, users can set up different partitions, called Zones, inside a Solaris implementation, which would allow different workloads to run simultaneously, each within their own environment, on a single machine.

First impressions of Solaris 11 11/11

I have had a few hours to try the final Solaris 11 release, overall I think it is far more stable and polished than the previous "Early Adaptors" release. Besides the fact that I am unable to use semi-old SPARC gear to test the release since only the latest generations of hardware are supported I have found few real problem so far.

Watch the Oracle Solaris 11 Launch

Watch as Oracle executives Mark Hurd and John Fowler announce the launch of Oracle Solaris 11, which brings proven enterprise capabilities to private, public, and hybrid clouds. Oracle Solaris 11 is the industry's best UNIX operating system with unique features including advanced file system technologies, advanced security, and built-in virtualization in every dimension.

Learn how Oracle Solaris 11 has been engineered, tested, and supported to get the most of SPARC and x86 systems including Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Oracle Exadata Database Machine, and SPARC SuperCluster engineered systems.

Solaris 11: Oracle Launches Cloud OS

Full highlights of the launch of Oracle Solaris 11.

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Wednesday 2 November 2011

Press Review #4

By Julien Gabel on Wednesday 2 November 2011, 19:21 - Solaris

Here is a little press review around Oracle technologies, and Solaris in particular:

Oracle Solaris 11 Launch Webcast

Build Your Next-Generation Datacenter in the Cloud

Watch Oracle executives Mark Hurd and John Fowler live from the Oracle Solaris 11 launch event in New York, and learn how you can build your next-generation datacenter in the cloud.

  1. Accelerate internal, public, and hybrid cloud applications
  2. Optimize application deployment with built-in virtualization
  3. Achieve top performance and cost advantages with Oracle Solaris 11–based engineered systems

Extra, Extra! Show Daily Newspaper Archives Now Available

From opening day through It's a Wrap!, the show daily newspaper covered all the highlights of Oracle OpenWorld 2011. Now, in addition to watching keynote and session replays on YouTube.com/Oracle, and downloading presentations from Content Catalog, you can also download free .pdfs of each issue.

T4 arrives!

A natural question for SPARC and Solaris customers would be "should I use a T4, a T3, or an M-series product?" Now that T-series has a broader range of applicability, there's more choice in platform selection: a T4 can be used in cases where M-series would have been the only answer. There's more overlap.

sparc.t4.1.png

In general, the M-series will still have the advantage for vertically scaling workloads that need massive CPU, memory, and I/O capacity, that need the higher redundancy and reliability features, and depend on the ability to add capacity to a running system by inserting CPU boards when needed. The T3 product will still find use in pure throughput computing applications because it has the higher core density and lower software license core factor (0.25 instead of 0.5).

sparc.t4.2.png

The T4 processor and the servers based on it mark a new level of performance for SPARC processors. With record performance it changes the game (and turns over stale assumptions) about SPARC performance. It also illustrates the commitment Oracle has to SPARC and Solaris, and our increased ability to execute on delivering faster system products. By adding single CPU performance to T-series, it extends the ability to leverage Oracle VM Server for SPARC (LDoms) for a broader range of applications. Big news indeed - and Oracle Open World is just starting up, so watch Oracle.com and blogs.oracle.com closely the next few days.

sparc.t4.3.png

Oracle Takes The Midrange Fight To IBM

Just like IBM lowered the boom on Sun back in the early 2000s with its AIX on Power ramp--made possible because IBM charged AS/400 shops exorbitant prices for hardware and software so it could discount AIX boxes insanely to win over Sun shops--Oracle is going to lower the boom on IBM and Hewlett-Packard in the portion of the server racket that is devoted to running Oracle, PeopleSoft, Siebel, JDE, and other applications. This time around, Oracle will be making deals on its database, middleware, and application software to help it push its iron. Mark my words. Larry Ellison is not joking around here; he was just waiting for the chip engineers to get the right processor out the door.

Very roughly speaking, I would guess that this Sparc cluster should have roughly the same performance as a Power 770 running database workloads, but it could be higher because of the compression and SQL pre-chewing of the Exadata storage arrays and the flash integrated into the Sparc T4-4 nodes when used in the SuperCluster.

Oracle previews Solaris 11, due in November

Fowler did not give the precise number of cores, threads, or memory capacity that Solaris 11 would span, but said Oracle took the time to rework the Solaris kernel with a new scheduler and a new I/O handler that would allow it to span tens of thousands of CPUs, hundreds of terabytes of main memory, exabytes of storage, and hundreds of gigabits of networking bandwidth. (In past presentations of the Sparc/Solaris roadmap, Fowler showed the design goal of a future Sparc system due in late 2014 or early 2015 as spanning 64 sockets in a single system image with a total of 16,384 threads and supporting 64TB of main memory.)

Solaris 11 has support for the dynamic threading implemented in the new Sparc T4 processors, launched last week, and also sports a latency-aware kernel memory allocator, an optimized shared memory stack, a parallel network stack, adaptable thread and memory placement, and enhancements in NUMA I/O (which will be important in future Sparc T series machines, presumably). The scheduler is aware of the different possible topologies in both x86 and Sparc systems and has NUMA-aware kernel memory fan out.

solaris11.rdbms.png

Fowler also said that 600 customers had Solaris 11 running in production already. Presumably he meant actual Solaris 11, not Solaris 11 Express. And he reminded OpenWorld attendees of Oracle's compatibility guarantee for Solaris applications: "Your applications will run on 11 or it is my problem."

Oracle Has Built A Modern, Cloudy AS/400

I've been thinking a lot lately about the juxtaposition of Oracle's "engineered systems" and IBM's "workload optimized systems," not just because these things are grabbing headlines, but because all the major system makers are trying to figure out a new way to sell a very old idea: machines designed to do very specific work rather than being general purpose systems. Only this time around, more than a few of them are trying to make these engineered systems out of commodity processors, memory, disk, flash, and networking components. The secret sauce--and the profit--in each one of them is not the hardware, but how a collection of hardware supports a very specific stack of application software.

If I were Larry Ellison, I would start pitching the cloud against on premise entry servers or build some baby clusters--probably both. Either could mean big trouble for Big Blue and its Power Systems business.

Solaris 10 8/11 (Update 10) Patchset now available

As you may know by now, these patchsets will bring all pre-existing packages up to the same software level as the corresponding Solaris Update. For example, all ZFS and Zones functionality is entirely contained in pre-existing packages, so applying the patchset will provide all the ZFS and Zones functionality and bug fixes contained in the corresponding Solaris Update.

When we release the Solaris Update patchset, we try to fix any serious late breaking issues found with the corresponding Solaris Update patchset. A list of additional patches added and the Caveats they address is contained in the patchset README.

Applying the patchset is not the same as upgrading to the Solaris Update release, as the patchset will not include any new packages introduced in the Solaris Update or any obsolete packages deleted in the Update.

Solaris 9 transitioning to Extended Support

Just a quick heads-up that Solaris 9 will transition to Vintage support (old sun terminology) / Extended support (Oracle terminology) at the end of this month.

Solaris 9 patches released from November 1, 2011, will have Vintage/Extended access entitlement by default, which means that only customers with an Extended Support contract for Solaris will be able to access them.

Oracle Solaris 11 Highlights from Oracle OpenWorld 2011!

Oracle Solaris 11 had some exciting news at Oracle OpenWorld 2011 this year! If you missed the John Fowler keynote or the Oracle Solaris 11 sessions - you can still catch all the highlights from links below.

What's New in Oracle Solaris 11

Oracle Solaris 11 adds new features to the #1 Enterprise OS, Solaris 10. Some of these features were in "preview form" in Solaris 11 Express. The feature sets introduced there have been greatly expanded in order to make Solaris 11 ready for your data center. Also, new features have been added that were not in Solaris 11 Express in any form.

The list of features below is not exhaustive. Complete documentation about changes to Solaris will be made available. To learn more, register for the Solaris 11 launch. You can attend in person, in New York City, or via webcast.

That Perplexing Power7+ Processor

What IBM is telling business partners is that the old Power7 machines and the new Power7 machines are essentially the same except for the memory and I/O capacity differences--including essentially the same price. They have the same software editions riding on top of them and for most customers, according to Big Blue, either machine will work fine. Those who have high-bandwidth networking and storage needs will want the newer machines, or those that are doing lots of virtualization or other memory-chewing workloads. At around $200 per GB, that extra memory is not cheap, so not everyone will want to go there anyway. In 2012, IBM told business partners, it will start pushing the fatter Power7 machines and later in the year it will withdraw the older boxes. The key thing, IBM told resellers was DO NOT DISRUPT 4Q11 SALES.

As I point out elsewhere in this issue, if you are buying one of the skinnier Power Systems from last year's catalog, you should demand some kind of compensation. There's no way the older machines are of the same value on the street with smaller potential memory and slower I/O. It probably isn't much of a difference, but there's no way it can be zero.

This newsletter advocates for Power Systems customers and it wants IBM to do more than worry about fourth quarter sales. It wants IBM to start taking a more aggressive technical fight to Intel so all of us in the IBM i ecosystem can do better.

Using SystemTap

While using SystemTap, I’ve been keeping notes of what I’ve been doing, including what worked and what didn’t, and how I fixed problems. It’s proven a handy reference.

In some recent threads about DTrace, people have asked how it compares to SystemTap – with some commenting that they haven’t had time to study either. I’ve been encouraged to post about my experiences, which is easy to do from my notes. I could (and probably should) get some of these into the SystemTap bug database, too.

What I’m sharing are various experiences of using SystemTap, including times where I made mistakes because I didn’t know what I was doing. I’ll begin with a narrative about tracing disk I/O, which connects together various experiences. After that it gets a little discontiguous, clipped from various notes. I’ll try to keep this technical, positive, and constructive. Perhaps this will help the SystemTap project itself, to see what a user (with a strong Dynamic Tracing and kernel engineering background) struggles with.

Using Oracle Ksplice to Update Oracle Linux Systems Without Rebooting

Oracle Ksplice is an exciting new addition to the Oracle Linux Premier Support subscription. Oracle Ksplice technology allows you to update systems with new kernel security errata (CVE) without the need to reboot, which enables you to remain current with OS vulnerability patches while minimizing downtime. Oracle Ksplice actively applies updates to the running kernel image, instead of making on-disk changes that would take effect only after a subsequent reboot.

Another requirement for getting Oracle Ksplice updates is the use of the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel from Oracle. The lowest Oracle Linux kernel version at the time of this writing is 2.6.32-100.28.9. This kernel (and newer) can be installed on both Oracle Linux 5 and Oracle Linux 6 distribution versions. Customers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 and 6 can do the simple migration to Oracle Linux and apply the packages on their existing installation of RHEL. Oracle does not offer Oracle Ksplice for Red Hat compatible kernels.

How to Create a Customized Oracle Solaris 11 Image Using the Distribution Constructor

This article describes how to create customized Oracle Solaris 11 images that contain customized software.

A brief overview of the reasons for creating a customized Oracle Solaris 11 image is provided. Relevant concepts are introduced, followed by a real example of using the Distribution Constructor to create custom ("golden") images. The example concludes with an illustration of taking the created image and making it available for consumption by systems as part of the provisioning process.

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Sunday 23 October 2011

Focus On Oracle OpenWorld 2011

By Julien Gabel on Sunday 23 October 2011, 23:45 - Solaris

Here is a brief overview of the OOW 2011:

OOW Oracle San Fransisco 2011

OpenWorld Content Catalog

If you missed the show or want to review content you saw during the sessions, you can now download many of the presentations from the OpenWorld site here. This site is open to the public, not just OpenWorld attendees. So even if you weren't able to join us in San Francisco, you can go download PDFs of the content that was presented.

First days of OOW

More news from OOW 2011

A new dawn for SPARC

SPARC presentations from OOW

Oracle Previews Oracle Solaris 11 at Oracle OpenWorld

Prepares for Planned Release of Oracle Solaris 11, the #1 Enterprise OS – Built for Clouds, Later This Year

solaris11.5.png

Solaris 11 is the operating system for Oracle’s recently announced SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 engineered system and Oracle’s SPARC T4 server line. It also powers the Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-2 and X2-8 systems, as well as Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud.

Oracle Solaris is developed, tested and supported as an integrated component of Oracle's "applications-to-disk" technology stack, which includes the Oracle Certification Environment, representing over 50,000 test use cases for every Oracle Solaris patch and platform released.

Oracle Solaris provides customers with the most choice in supported enterprise applications with over 11,000 third-party applications on a wide range of SPARC and x86 systems.

solaris11.6.png

Oracle Solaris 11 guarantees binary compatibility with previous Oracle Solaris versions, through the Oracle Solaris Binary Application Guarantee Program and development compatibility between SPARC and x86 platforms, providing customers with a seamless upgrade path and the industry’s best investment protection.

Oracle's Larry Ellison unveils 'Exalytics' in-memory machine

"We're determined to deliver best-of-breed in every aspect of our computing architecture," Ellison said. "We're in the business of catching up [with IBM] in the microprocessor business. If we don't pass them we'll be very, very close. If our microprocessor is the same speed and we move data a hundred times faster than they do, I like our chances in the marketplace."

From the beginning, Oracle's design goals for its systems were the highest performance for the lowest cost, Ellison said. "For a given task, it will cost you less on an Exadata than it would on a plain old commodity server."

The main idea was a "parallel everything" architecture, with various set of components working in unison for more power and reliability, he said. "These machines should never, ever fail," he said. "Hardware breaks. Software breaks too. But if you have a parallel architecture you should be tolerant of those failures."

Meanwhile, faster chips aren't the best way to make software run faster, because the real bottleneck is storage, according to Ellison. Database performance is "about moving data, and not doing arithmetic on a microprocessor," he said.

Overall, "we move data around a hundred times faster than anyone else in this business," Ellison claimed. Ellison cited a series of companies such as Proctor & Gamble, BNP Paribas and AFG, which experienced vast performance and cost savings through Exadata. Some 1,000 Exadata machines have been installed and 3,000 more will be sold this year, Ellison said.

Oracle enters BI with Exalytics appliance

The Exalytics appliance, revealed by Oracle chief Larry Ellison on Sunday, is designed to run business intelligence analytics at high speeds via a terabyte of DRAM for in-memory computing.

"[Exalytics is] hardware and software engineered together to deliver data analysis at the speed of thought," Ellison said in a keynote speech at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco. "Everything runs faster if you keep it in DRAM, if you keep it in main memory."

Although storage costs are notably volatile, DRAM costs around $10 (£6.40) a gigabyte, compared with flash at around $1 a gigabyte and hard disk at 4 cents. However, DRAM has the advantage of allowing data to be processed and the results sent to the consumer at speeds that are orders of magnitude faster than data stored in other technologies.

Fast, Safe, Cheap : Pick 3

Today, we're making performance headlines with Oracle's ZFS Storage Appliance:

  1. SPC-1 : Twice the performance of NetApp at the same latency; Half the $/IOPS.
  2. 2X the absolute performance, 2.5X cheaper per SPC-1 IOPS, almost 3X lower latency, 30% cheaper per user GB with room to grow... So, If you have a storage decision coming and you need, FAST, SAFE, CHEAP : pick 3, take a fresh look at the ZFS Storage appliance.

ZFSSA.1.png
ZFSSA.2.png

We are announcing that Oracle's 7420C cluster acheived 137000 SPC-1 IOPS with an average latency of less than 10 ms. That is double the results of NetApp's 3270A while delivering the same latency. As compared to the NetApp 3270 result, this is a 2.5x improvement in $/SPC-1-IOPS (2.99$/IOPS vs $7.48/IOPS). We're also showing that when the ZFS Storage Appliance runs at the rate posted by the 3270A (68034 SPC-1 IOPS), our latency of 3.26ms is almost 3X lower than theirs (9.16ms). Moreover, our result was obtained with 23700 GB of user level capacity (internally mirrored) for 17.3 $/GB while NetApp's , even using a space saving raid scheme, can only deliver 23.5$/GB. This is the price per GB of application data actually used in the benchmark. On top of that the 7420C still had 40% of space headroom whereas the 3270A was left with only 10% of free blocks.

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Sunday 16 October 2011

Focus On The Solaris 11 OS

By Julien Gabel on Sunday 16 October 2011, 18:33 - Solaris

Here is a brief overview on a Oracle OpenWorld 2011presentation on the Solaris 11 operating system:

SPARC Strategy

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Saturday 15 October 2011

Focus On The SPARC Architecture

By Julien Gabel on Saturday 15 October 2011, 17:30 - Solaris

Here is a brief overview on a Oracle OpenWorld 2011presentation on the SPARC architecture:

Next Generation SPARC Processor

An In-Depth Technical Review

Some slides about the SPARC T4 performance:

sparc.1.png
sparc.2.png
sparc.3.png
sparc.4.png
sparc.5.png

SPARC Strategy

Public roadmap updated:

sparc.6.png

About the new SPARC SuperCluster:

sparc.7.png
sparc.8.png
sparc.9.png

Some slides about the T-Series and SuperCluster performance:

sparc.10.png
sparc.11.png
sparc.12.png
sparc.13.png

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Monday 10 October 2011

Encrypted SWAP Device Just Disappeared In Solaris 11 EA

By Julien Gabel on Monday 10 October 2011, 11:18 - Solaris

For some months, I used to encrypt the SWAP device (which is a ZFS volume) and thus have an encrypted /tmp. This worked fine with Solaris 11 Express, but I encountered a strange behavior in Solaris 11 EA which leads to have the SWAP device to... well, just disappeared.

Here is what I found after two boots; and on several machines:

# swap -l
No swap devices configured

# zfs list -t volume
NAME         USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
rpool/dump  32.8G   240G  31.8G  -

# grep swap /etc/vfstab
swap            -               /tmp            tmpfs   -       yes     -
/dev/zvol/dsk/rpool/swap        -               -               swap    -       no      encrypted

So, the rpool/swap dataset disappeared. I am sure not to have destroyed it, in particular since this appears on multiple servers. Nevertheless, I found this in the history of the zpool command:

# zpool history | grep destroy
[...]
2011-10-05.10:22:49 zfs destroy rpool/swap

# last reboot | head -2
reboot    system boot                   Wed Oct  5 10:23
reboot    system down                   Wed Oct  5 10:20

So, this problem seems to be related to some actions at boot time. What have the logs of SMF services to say about that?

# find /var/svc/log -print | xargs grep -i swap
/var/svc/log/system-filesystem-usr:default.log:cannot create 'rpool/swap': pool must be upgraded to set this property or value
/var/svc/log/system-filesystem-usr:default.log:cannot open 'rpool/swap': dataset does not exist
/var/svc/log/system-filesystem-usr:default.log:cannot create 'rpool/swap': pool must be upgraded to set this property or value
/var/svc/log/system-filesystem-usr:default.log:cannot open 'rpool/swap': dataset does not exist

# tail -3 /var/svc/log/system-filesystem-usr:default.log
[ Oct  5 12:00:05 Executing start method ("/lib/svc/method/fs-usr"). ]
cannot create 'rpool/swap': pool must be upgraded to set this property or value
[ Oct  5 12:00:13 Method "start" exited with status 0. ]

Ouch, what happened here? The message is interesting, but is a little misleading: it is on fresh Solaris 11 EA installations, and so the pools and datasets are all up to date:

# zpool upgrade && zfs upgrade
This system is currently running ZFS pool version 33.
All pools are formatted using this version.
This system is currently running ZFS filesystem version 5.
All filesystems are formatted with the current version.

So, it seems that the rpool/swap device is re-created at boot time, and for some reason it doesn't work as expected. Here is an attempt to discover where the device is re-created and why it does fail.

# find /lib/svc/method -print | xargs grep -i sbin/swapadd
/lib/svc/method/fs-usr:/usr/sbin/swapadd -1
/lib/svc/method/nfs-client:     /usr/sbin/swapadd
/lib/svc/method/fs-local:/usr/sbin/swapadd >/dev/null 2>&1

# grep "zfs destroy" /usr/sbin/swapadd
                zfs destroy $zvol > /dev/null 2>&1

# sed -n '/zfs create/,/\$zvol/p' /usr/sbin/swapadd
        zfs create -V $volsize -o volblocksize=`/usr/bin/pagesize` \
            -o primarycache=$primarycache -o secondarycache=$secondarycache \
            -o encryption=$encryption -o keysource=raw,file:///dev/random $zvol

So, the re-creation at boot time of the rpool/swap appears only when using an encrypted volume. And after a bit of digging, here what I found. At the first boot, here is the command used to create the encrypted volume:

zfs create -V 4G -o volblocksize=8192 -o primarycache=metadata -o secondarycache=all -o encryption=on -o keysource=raw,file:///dev/random rpool/swap

But on a second boot, here is the slightly different command used this time:

zfs create -V 4G -o volblocksize=8192 -o primarycache=metadata -o secondarycache=all -o encryption=aes-128-ctr -o keysource=raw,file:///dev/random rpool/swap

This is because the arguments passed to the command is backed-up and restored from the settings just before the deletion of the volume. As mentioned in the zfs(1m) manual page, only the following encryption algorithm are supported... and so the one which is sets is not valid (the error message saying that the pool must be upgraded to set this property or value is a little more clear by now).

encryption=off | on | aes-128-ccm | aes-192-ccm | aes-256-ccm | aes-128-gcm | aes-192-gcm | aes-256-gcm

The question is, how can this happen? Where does this algorithm com from? The answer is simple: it seems that this is the swap(1m) command which alters some properties of the rpool/swap volume:

# swap -d /dev/zvol/dsk/rpool/swap
# zfs destroy rpool/swap
# zfs create -V 4G -o volblocksize=8192 -o primarycache=metadata -o secondarycache=all -o encryption=on -o keysource=raw,file:///dev/random rpool/swap
# zfs list -H -o type,volsize,volblocksize,encryption rpool/swap
volume  4G      8K      on
# swap -1 -a /dev/zvol/dsk/rpool/swap
# zfs list -H -o type,volsize,volblocksize,encryption rpool/swap
volume  4G      1M      aes-128-ctr

Not only is the algorithm changed to something not supported (yet?), but the volblocksize property is touched as well. This was not the case on Solaris 11 Express 2010.11.

Hope someone can help me on this side, and that this is a known bug which is already (or will be quickly) addressed, in particular for the Solaris 11 GA. I already posted a comment on the blog of Darren Moffat, just in case this can help a bit.

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Sunday 9 October 2011

Oracle Unveils The World’s Fastest General Purpose Engineered System, The SPARC SuperCluster T4-4

By Julien Gabel on Sunday 9 October 2011, 17:06 - Solaris

Here is a little press review around Oracle technologies:

The world’s fastest general-purpose engineered system

Overview

The Oracle SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 is a general purpose engineered solution for running a wide range of enterprise applications with the highest levels of performance and mission critical reliability. The SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 utilizes high performance software from Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic combined with new SPARC T4-4 servers, Oracle Exadata Storage Servers, ZFS Storage Appliance, and InfiniBand technology, and Oracle Solaris 11. With the addition of the SPARC SuperCluster, Oracle continues to set the standard for engineered systems: maximizing customer value with leading performance in a complete and tested package.

News Facts

In a preview of Oracle OpenWorld 2011, Oracle announced the SPARC SuperCluster T4-4, the first general purpose engineered system that combines the computing power of the new SPARC T4 processor, the performance and scalability of Oracle Solaris 11, the optimized database performance of Oracle Exadata storage, and the accelerated middleware processing of the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud.

SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 server is an integrated apps-to-disk solution that delivers the highest performance, security, and manageability with the lowest TCO. Based on Oracle's next-generation SPARC T4 servers, these systems can deploy multiple databases and applications, and multiple tiers of applications while providing lightning-fast improvements on data compression, queries, OLTP response times, and Java middleware performance. Applications can run on a mix of Oracle Solaris 10 and Oracle Solaris 11 via Oracle VM Server for SPARC and Oracle Solaris Containers.

Oracle's SPARC SuperCluster is ideal for the consolidation of mission-critical enterprise applications or for the deployment of Oracle Optimized Solutions, which provide fully documented best practices and ongoing full-stack and patch testing. Today Oracle announced two new Oracle Optimized Solutions for the SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 that will support PeopleSoft Human Capital Management and Oracle WebCenter Content. Delivered tested and ready to run, these systems can be deployed in days, not months. Oracle continues to set the standard for engineered systems that deliver record-breaking performance in a complete and tested package.

Oracle rises for Unix server push

SPARC T4 systems: Same skins, new brains

Oracle is taking the fight to Unix market leader IBM with its eight-core SPARC T4 processor and systems with rack, blade, and clustered systems – a full data center press.

The SPARC T4 processors, with an S3 core, were developed under the code-name "Yosemite Falls" and offer better performance than Oracle expected. They will be included in standalone rack and blade servers as well as in SPARC SuperCluster configurations that mimic the Exadata parallel database and Exalogic parallel application serving system, built on Intel x86 processors and running Linux.

The clock speeds of the processors were not divulged, but Oracle has been able to rev them up to 2.85GHz and 3GHz in the SPARC T4 systems, 73 and 82 per cent faster respectively than the previous 16-core SPARC T3 processors, which ran at a much slower 1.65GHz.

While those SPARC T3 chips had eight threads per core (using the older S2 cores) and did a reasonable amount of work on some applications (like database, Java, and application serving), single-threaded code did not perform particularly well. So with the S3 cores, Oracle's chipheads added dynamic threading (in contrast to the static threading in the S1 and S2 cores) and also added something called the critical thread API. This allows applications to hog all the resources on an S3 core to boost the performance of a single-threaded application. The SPARC T4 can switch between the thread-hog and normal modes on the fly.

Ellison rides SPARC T4 SuperCluster into data centers

Four star general purpose, sir!

Oracle resells Fujitsu's SPARC64-VII+ machines, badged the SPARC Enterprise M machines, for customers who have big jobs that require a shared memory system. But over the past two decades, Oracle co-founder and CEO Larry Ellison has made no secret of the fact that he believes that computing in future will be parallel, spreading data and database crunching across multiple compute nodes, instead of trying to create ever-larger shared memory systems to hold databases.

Ellison lectured considerably on the benefits of parallelism and data compression for database processing, and talked quite a bit about the Exadata machines, of which Oracle has sold 1,000 machines thus far – Oracle's "most successful product ever," he claimed – and plans to sell an additional 3,000 machines before the end of the year. (It is not clear if Oracle meant calendar or fiscal year there.)

"We're a lot faster than IBM's biggest pSeries machine," Ellison proclaimed, comparing a cluster of x86 servers running the 11g database and the Exadata storage software on an InfiniBand backbone to a wonking 256-core Power 795 SMP server. Here's how he stacked the two machines up, fully loaded:

exadata.extreme.png
Eight Exadata X2-2 racks versus one IBM Power 795 and four DS8700 arrays

This is the "engineered systems" game that Oracle will be playing. Ellison said that two racks of Exadata could do queries anywhere from 10 to 50 times faster than the Power 795/DS8700 combo, with 4 to 10 times the OLTP throughput and with 10 times the amount of storage (with compression turned on) – and do so for a cost of $3.3m, compared to $18.86m for the IBM hardware. "The Exadata system costs way less than a memory upgrade on the IBM pSeries, and you have to be willing to run a lot faster," Ellison quipped. "The P795 is one big, expensive single point of failure," he added, pointing out that Oracle RAC was inherently fault-tolerant.

IBM opens Power8 kimono (a little bit more)

Wafer baked in 22 nanometers

Data was a little thin, and intentionally so on the part of Big Blue. But with Oracle kicking up a big fuss over Intel's Itanium processor roadmap - which the software giant says is a dead end - it looks like IBM has decided it was time to be more specific.

Only a little bit more specific, mind you. Server makers and chip makers don't like to make promises because business conditions change and issues crop up in reality that can cause a processor or server design and its schedule to diverge from the roadmap.

A case in point is one of the earlier schedules for the Power processor lineup, which had Power6 coming out in 2006, Power6+ in 2007, Power7 in 2008, and Power7+ in 2009. That was a two-year cadence for a new processor design and a two-year cadence for a chip manufacturing process shrink interwoven.

For reasons that IBM never explained, and which no doubt had to do with its wafer baking plant in East Fishkill, New York, and maybe its 65 nanometer processes as well as reduced competition from Intel and Sun Microsystems (now part of Oracle) in the high-end server racket, Big Blue lengthened the cadence by 50 per cent ahead of the Power6 launch. Also the Power6+ was not whatever it was supposed to be.

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