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.
- Accelerate internal, public, and hybrid cloud applications
- Optimize application deployment with built-in virtualization
- 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Oracle ACE