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Solaris

ZFS (and other Solaris File Systems) Tutorial Available On-Line

I’ve been teaching Solaris tutorials for many years, mostly for USENIX. One of those tutorials is about Solaris file systems, mostly ZFS of course. Addison Wesley approached me about recording that one as a “Live Lesson” – one of a series of on-line tutorials they publish.

I’m very pleased that my Solaris File Systems Live Lesson is now available for purchase from InformIT (http://www.informit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0321753003) and also at the O’Reilly Safari Books Online facility  (http://my.safaribooksonline.com/video/-/9780321718372) where it can be viewed and purchased in small chunks or in its >4 hours full glory! The tutorial features discussion of which file system to use in which scenarios, and spends most of its time going through ZFS theory, implementation details, hands-on demonstrations, and best practice exploration.

Latest Columns – Comparing Solaris, RHEL, and AIX

The December 2010 and February 2011 columns for ;login: are now out. This two-parter compares Solaris, RHEL, and AIX. Probably controversial! Feedback welcome.

Have a look:
December 2010 ;login: Magazine: Comparing Solaris, RHEL, and AIX Part 1.
February 2011 ;login: Magazine: Comparing Solaris, RHEL, and AIX Part 2 – virtualization.

New Columns

It looks like I’ve been remiss in posting my ;login: magazine columns here. Sorry about that!

April 2010 ;login: Magazine: Open source and free deduplication.

June 2010 ;login: Magazine: The Exadata V2 architecture and why it matters.

August 2010 ;login: Magazine: The status of Sun products.

October 2010 ;login: Magazine: The “problem” with NAS.

The December column is the first of a two-parter that compares Solaris, RHEL, and AIX. I’ll try to have it available here as soon as it is published.

As always I encourage you to become a member of Usenix, thereby gaining access to all of the content of ;login: (along with many other great benefits).

Column – OpenSolaris Crossbow

Project Crossbow is an innovate, and I think important, new contribution to the OpenSolaris project. Crossbow makes network virtualization and resource management first-class citizens in OpenSolaris. If follows in the footsteps of ZFS by having a simple and easy-to-understand interface, while providing great flexibility and power to the administrator. Crossbow can only be found in OpenSolaris, and is not available in Solaris 10. My February column for ;login: Magazine describes and explores Project Crossbow in detail. You can download it here, but as always I encourage you to become a member of Usenix, thereby gaining access to all of the content of ;login: (along with many other great benefits).
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Teaching at the Usenix ATC conference

I’ll be teaching two days of my Solaris tutorials at the Usenix ATC conference in San Diego during the week of June 15th. Hope to see you there!

I'm going to USENIX '09

Sixth NEOSUG meeting rescheduled

We’ve rescheduled the sixth NEOSUG meeting for March 11. Dave Miner will talk about the state of OpenSolaris and demo some new functionality, and I’ll talk about what’s new in the Solaris 10 update 6 (11/08) release. Hope to see you there. For full details and registration info have look at the NEOSUG discussion forum.

The OpenSolaris Bible Published

Very happy to see the fruits of the labor of Nicholas Solter, Gerald Jelinek, and David MinerThe OpenSolaris Bible. Just received my copies (I was Technical Editor) of the book, and it is the best way to learn OpenSolaris. It focuses on the user experience, but also has lots of good how-to detail about administration. Note that they are offering some free chapter downloads (check out the right-hand column) as well. Check it out at Amazon.

My latest column at ;login:

The February 2009 ;login: magazine includes my latest column. This time it’s all about the Sun 7000 Analytics component. The Sun 7000 is a new NAS storage device from Sun. It was implemented as a skunk works project by the “Fishworks” team – a team that includes some of the best and brightest Sun engineers. It is a true appliance with a few break-through features, including the use of DTrace technologies within a great GUI. Using this tool, the storage administrator can see unprecedented amounts of performance information about the NAS appliance. ;login: makes some columns publicly available, but other available only to members. While I strongly encourage membership in the USENIX association, I also like to make my writings more widely available. The column can be read for free in .pdf format here: 2009-02-galvin.

Postponed – Sixth NEOSUG Meeting

Just a quick note that we’re postponing the 6th NEOSUG meeting due to inclement weather and low registrations. For more details see the NEOSUG forum at http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=88485&tstart=0

Column – The Death of Solaris

My latest column has been published in ;login:. I have attached it for your convenience. Dec 2008 ;login: column.