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New Columns

Jan 13th, 2011
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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

Feb 16th, 2010
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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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New column posted – Appropriate uses for Sun’s T-Servers

Sep 24th, 2009
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Sun T-servers (also known as “CMT” or “coolthreads” servers) are low-cost and high capacity. But they are not a perfect fit for all workloads. My latest column goes through the details and how to determine if the T-servers are a good choice for a given application workload. It’s available here.

Sun 7000 FAQ published at CTIStrategy

Apr 23rd, 2009
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The Sun 7000 is a new NAS storage line from Sun. It contains lots of new ideas, and some of those new ideas can be a bit confusing. My colleague Jesse St. Laurent has taken the lead on clearing up the confusion by writing the Sun 7000 FAQ. Have a look at it and feel free to add questions (or answers) via the form at the bottom of the page.

Sixth NEOSUG meeting rescheduled

Mar 2nd, 2009
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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

Feb 11th, 2009
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Very happy to see the fruits of the labor of Nicholas Solter, Gerald Jelinek, and David Miner – The 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.

Eulogy for a benchmark : The Observation Deck

Feb 3rd, 2009
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Bryan Cantrill posted an important blog entry about the problems with benchmarking in general, NAS benchmarking more specifically, and the current industry standard SPEC SFS bencmark in detail. In summary, the current “standard” NAS performance benchmark is worse that useless or missleading, it encourages NAS vendors to engineer NAS solutions are overpriced and underperforming, just to get better benchmark numbers. Have a look:

Eulogy for a benchmark : The Observation Deck.

My latest column at ;login:

Jan 30th, 2009
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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

Jan 27th, 2009
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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

Jan 12th, 2009
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My latest column has been published in ;login:. I have attached it for your convenience. Dec 2008 ;login: column.

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