Monday, September 30, 2013

Third Annual Solaris Family Reunion (Part 1)


Abstract:
Deirdre at Joyent helped to organize The Third Annual Solaris Family Reunion sponsored by Joyent on September 23, 2013.Attendees ranged from former employees at Sun to current employees at Oracle. Each discoursed a short 10 minute presentation as to what they have been doing over the past 3 years. This includes sessions 1 through 6.


Session 1: Opening with Bryan Cantrill of Joyent


Session 2: Visualization & Medieval Medicine with Brendan Gregg since 2010
DTrace, Performance, Observability, and Visualization in SmartOS
System Tap, JDB, KVM, freezing, and crash dump, in Red Hat Linux: .
Introducing: Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud


Session 3: VP Eric Schrock & CTO Adam Leventhal of Delphix since 2010
Formerly worked on FishWorks in Sun, cared about all workloads.
Delphix specializes in building virtualized databases, snapshots, and clones.
Improved ZFS for low space, fragmentation, small record conditions, and write throttle.
Tremendous innovation with Java Management Stack for OpenSolaris, Linux, HP-UX, IBM AIX.
Famous Quote, "The AIX Documentation completely outstrips the implementation" and "We use COMSTAR alot... it still sucks... love to rip it out"


Session 4: Nexenta, Illumos, and DEY Storage Systems Garrett D'Amore
Founded Illumos while at Nexenta, moved to DEY Storage Systems.
Generate analytics with DTrace. Crossbow can be used to virtualize storage service, uniquely under Solaris.


Session 5: Oracle employee Blake Jones
Revisited Virtual Memory System in Oracle Solaris, released in Solaris 11.1.
The 36 page paper in 2011 had a small number of papers implemented.
Free List Management was implemented with Dynamic Reconfiguration and memory retirement.
The M6-32 was released at Oracle, with 32 Gigabytes of RAM.
Large Shared Memory algorithms which do work with large pages.
Famous quote, "Now at Oracle, we still are building  the hardware, building the Operating System, and we are building stuff on top of it that really doesn't suck."


Session 6: Bill Moore
New startup with new high-capacity flash modules, new product to be released in a number of months.