A New Tablet on the Horizon?

A New Tablet on the Horizon?

Mac Tablet Rumors

There has been grumbling about Apple Macintosh "tablet" form factors for years, although the leaks have been getting more substantial as of late.

One such published rumor included a quote, from an enthusiast, which was highly criticized:
"The iTouch Tablet is about to change society as we know it."

This comment really all depends upon the execution by Apple.

Background to Successful Appliance Launches

What made the iPod, iPod Touch and iPhone successful?

Apple figured out how to change the industries in three markets: portable music players, PDA's, and Cell Phones. As a side note, Apple failed to create the PDA market with the Newton.

If Apple applies the same consideration into the Tablet market, they could do well.

Moving onto the Tablet

Making a successful consumer oriented appliance technology in a tablet which is easily manageable could be the key. Without the need for OS patches & upgrades in conjunction with virus updates, many traditional market outlets could choose the device over a portable PC or laptop:

• home theater entertainment
• eBook reading appliances
• libraries
• conference centers
• church pulpits
• university professors
• university students
• audio mixing consoles
• video special effects generators
• lighting control panels

Anyone who has used cheaply manufactured devices (made with little attention to software & hardware details) tire of the experience quickly (due to the issues inherent with trash design & manufacturing.) A large number of good ideas go to the technical graveyard when consumers believe they are poorly implemented the first time around. An Apple "iTablet" with the engineering of a Apple MacBook Air might be accepted rapidly.


Anyone who has used industrial devices, which have physical controls, spend a pretty penny for them - moving the technology to touch screen controls could result in a far better user experience and longevity in the device usage without substantial maintenance in cleaning sliders/pots.

If Apple does a tablet right, they could really revolutionize many industries.

Network Management

What does all of this have to do with Network Management?

• Network Management uses obtuse interfaces from a variety of vendors.
  
• The features from multiple vendors use significantly different interfaces, some of which provide poor user interface capabilities, and all are generally very expensive to implement on a per-user basis.
• People are becoming familiar with many "Web 2.0" features in every day life and these are not being backfilled into the Network Management arena by vendors.
• People are demanding more mobility and many Network Management vendors are not delivering these features by investing in a time of low revenue in an global economic recession.
  

How could these issues be resolved in a tablet?

• Remote Control capabilities (such as RDP, VNC, Telnet) are all available & widely distributed today in the iPod Touch and iPhone via Apple iTunes today, at a very reasonable cost (per user.)
• Remote debugging capabilities (such as Ping, Traceroute) are available & widely distributed today in the iPhone Touch and iPhone via Apple iTunes today, at a very reasonable cost (per user.)
• Corporations are already leveraging portables such as iPod Touch and iPhone via Microsoft Exchange support for corporate applications.
• VPN capabilities are built into remote devices like the iPhone today for remote capabilities.
  
• Using a standard interface, imposed by the iPod Touch or iPhone API's for multiple existing Web 2.0 applications, help users reduce barriers to entry through simplification, and would reduce training requirements for existing Network Management applications due to obtuse user interfaces by the vendors.
• Using a standard interface, imposed by the iPod Touch or iPhone API's for multiple existing Web 2.0 applications, would allow greater cross-vendor integration, since the platform would become the integration location.
• User interaction with Network Management maps and displays often use mouse clicks and drags, while API's in the iPod Touch and iPhone offer much more intuitive interactions such as dragging your finger or pinch.
• API integration of Google Maps into iPod Touch or iPhone with Location would reduce the burden of development on Network Management user interfaces - providing sophisticated geographical maps to the application provider without needing to create & license bloat-ware.
• API integration of Google Maps into iPod Touch or iPhone with Location would reduce the burden of use with Network Management user interfaces - providing a unified look-and-feel to what users expect in typical mapping applications while on foot or in their car
• People are already familiar with standard notification technology with their home computers through Web 2.0 interfaces and the mobile equivalents (through devices such as the Apple iPod Touch and Apple iPhone) - so the building of new notification technology filters by vendors becomes irrelevant, allowing users to use interfaces comfortable to them, while being productive more quickly when starting to use the standard interfaces
  
• The cost of a Apple "iTablet" hardware (or whatever it will be called) would be far less than the licensing per-user that is typically paid to a vendor on a per-seat charge, if standard interfaces could be developed to Web 2.0 environment.
• Not knowing what managed vendor equipment looks like is something that could be a thing of the past when leveraging software suite built into the Apple iPhone or iPod Touch - with the ability to have integrated photo library that sync's with a central database, a library could be kept up-to-date on all remote devices very easily, since the software management is built in.
  

Closing Thoughts

Will Apple release a tablet?

This is a great unknown, but all being said, moving Network Management applications to devices like the Apple iPod Touch and iPhone is a no-brainer.

A larger form factor in an appliance (that is not an Apple laptop) could easily infiltrate the Network Management business, especially if it can demonstrate cost savings during dire economic times.

Rock Cancellation Rumor, The Bizarre, and The Benefits

Rock Cancellation Rumor, The Bizarre, and The Benefits

Rock Cancellation Rumor

There has been much speculation concerning the rumor originating from the New York Times suggesting Sun Microsystems canceled the processor UltraSPARC RK called 'Rock'.

Understanding the history behind 'Rock' provides support to just about any rumor.

• UltraSPARC III+ was canceled by Sun
• UltraSPARC IV+ was released late by Sun, with excellent performance
  
• UltraSPARC V was canceled by Sun
• UltraSPARC T1 was deployed on-time by Sun, with excellent performance
• UltraSPARC T2 was deployed on-time by Sun, with excellent performance
• UltraSPARC T2+ was deployed on-time by Sun, with excellent scalability
• Sun Microsystems partnered with Fujitsu to release a joint server product line based around the SPARC64 processor
  
• UltraSPARC RK was delayed multiple times by Sun
  

Rock Unintersting?

There was very good historical information in many trade journals. One of the most bizarre quote regarding Sun Microsystems processor UltraSPARC RK or 'Rock' was from Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research. His quote was widely reported in various trade magazines, such as:

• Sun's Rock Chip Doomed From The Start
• Sun's Rock doomed from start, analysts say
• Sun's Rock doomed from start, analysts say
  

"Even if Rock had made it to market, it would have been an uninteresting processor as companies like Intel and AMD are offering high-performance chips at more reasonable prices, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research."

Suggesting 'Rock' is "uninteresting" demonstrates a level of ignorance beyond comprehension.

Rock Interested Audiences

'Rock' is an interesting processor to Computer Scientists since they have worked for decades trying to optimize single threaded applications. Thread bound applications run with very painful waits when they encounter cache misses on traditional proprietary (Intel & AMD) processors. These waits are a thing of the past on Rock with technologies such as:

• thread level parallelism
• thread level speculation
• transactional memory
• out-of-order retirement
• deferred queue

'Rock' is a very interesting processor in the academic world since companies like Intel and AMD have not recently pioneered computer science technologies in silicon to optimize single threaded applications. Implementations of theory in real silicon are very important to review academic thoughts and determine future implications. Implementations like 'Rock' are studied for decades.

'Rock' is a very interesting processor for business, military, and academia system performance of single thread bound applications - software threads on 'Rock' runs with very few of the painfully long waits on slow memory due to cache misses, commonly experienced with Intel and AMD processors. People who purchase systems expect their systems to be doing work, instead of sitting around idle.

'Rock' is a very interesting processor in the commercial world since accelerating legacy single thread-bound software allow for acceleration of existing software (which does not scale well with multiple threads) - something the major CPU developers (AMD and Intel) in rest of the market have been ignoring for a couple of years. If a single thread is the problem, newer CPU's from other vendors will not solve their performance problem, increase the thread bottlenecked performance, and increase the business profitability.

'Rock' is a very interesting processor in the investment community. Sun had pioneered the niche of multi-threaded hardware with the release of their 32 hardware thread UltraSPARC T1 processor - driving other vendors (Intel, AMD) to change their directions to start heavily threading their CPU's... discontinuing projects to speed existing single-threaded applications. The release of Rock would enable Sun to pioneer this lost niche, abandoned by the other vendors. Filling niches are very profitable to investors in those technologies.

'Rock' is very interesting to the environmentally conscience consumer. Very little work has been done recently in the market to increase the performance of single threaded software, with the exception of increasing clock rate, which drives up the costs to consumers in: hardware, cooling, and power consumption. Rock has been the exception - targeting increased single threaded performance without aggressively increasing clock rate and the negatives that go along with it.

'Rock' is a very interesting processor for enterprises struggling with consolidation efforts. Bundling 16 high-speed cores into a single chip which supports LDOM's at the firmware level and Solaris Containers at the OS Level provides a consolidation platform for legacy applications which are not highly-threaded and required high single threaded throughput.

Rock & Role in Network Management

Network Management infrastructure is greatly benefited by highly threaded underlying infrastructure. It is not unusual to tun run hundreds to thousands of polling threads on centralized network management platforms. Any highly-threaded CPU platform (Sun OpenSPARC UltraSPARC T series) help to provide hardware acceleration to the polling processes, reducing the amount of time proprietary CPU's normally spend on context switches, constantly pulling/pushing registers from/to slow memory.

While Network Management sees great performance strides with highly threaded hardware during 24x7x365 operations, not all areas are optimized. Two areas where highly threaded hardware (with slower individual thread performance) need improvement include: startup/shutdown time when the database needs to be loaded/dumped and post-discovery time when data needs to be consolidated with relationships built to all the other objects.

On some very large network topologies with extremely high (99.999) availability concerns - a slow startup time or slow post-discovery time is considered unacceptable - every minute counts in the case of software or hardware failure when protected with a High Availability kit.

Rock provides a mid-range position, between the $100K US$ super-threaded UltraSPARC T2+ SMP processors with high throughput (256 hardware threads) leveraging slower threads, and super-fast $1M US$ super-core'ed SPARC64 VII SMP (256 hardware threads) leveraging faster threads.

Rock's role in network management is clearly defined and beneficial.

Conclusion

Trade journalist writer Jon Stokes came to a diametrically opposite conclusion:

In the end, I can't say that I'm really sold on Sun's very aggressive use of speculative execution, but I will say that Rock is one of the most interesting and novel processors that I've seen in 10 years of covering this space. In its own way, it's every bit as exotic as IBM's Cell processor, but because all of that exoticism is hidden from the programmer it won't be nearly as difficult for developers to deal with.

I think this says it all.

OpenSolaris 2009.06 - Network Virtualization

OpenSolaris 2009.06 - Network Virtualization

Network Virtualization Technology: Project Crossbow

Sun has been working at re-architecting the TCP/IP stack in Solaris for Virtualization for close to 3 years, making progress each year with new features. OpenSolaris 2009.06 exhibits some of the most recent enhancements
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1640183659?bctid=24579687001

Network infrastructure in Solaris has been re-written at the NIC, Driver, and Socket levels - all the way up the stack.

Network Virtualization has to do with dedicated resources and isolation of network resources. They are talking about multiple: Hardware Ring Buffers in a NIC, TCP/IP Stacks in a Kernel, Kernel Ring Buffers in a Stack.

http://www.opensolaris.com/use/ProjectCrossbow.pdf
"Crossbow is designed as a fully parallelized network stack structure. If you think of a physical network link as a road, then Crossbow allows dividing that road into multiple lanes. Each lane represents a flow of packets, and the flows are architected to be independent of each other — no common queues, no common threads, no common locks, no common counters."

Some of the more interesting results of this integration: create networks with no physical NIC cards; create switches in software; assign bandwidth to a virtual NIC card (vNIC); assign CPU resources to a vNIC; assign quality of service (QoS) attributes to a vNIC; throttling protocols on a vNIC; virtualize dumb NIC's via the kernel to look like smart NIC's; switch automatically between interrupt and polled modes.

The implications are staggering:

• Heavy consumption of network resources by an application does not necessarily have to step-on other mission critical applications running in another virtual server
• Priorities for latency sensitive protocols (ex. VoIP) can be specified for traffic based upon various packet policies, like Source IP, Destination IP, MAC address, Port, or Protocol
• Security is enhanced since Solaris 10 containers no longer have to share IP stacks for the same physical NIC, but physical NIC's can now have multiple IP stacks for each container
• Multiple physical ports can be aggregated into a single virtual port and then re-subdivided into multiple virtual NIC's so many applications or many virtual servers can experience load sharing and redundancy in a simplified way (once at the lowest layer instead of multiple times, for each virtual machine)
  
• Older systems can be retained for D-R or H-A since their dumb NIC's would be virtualized in the kernel and the newer NIC's with newer equipment can be added into the application cluster for enhanced performance
• Heavily used protocols will switch a stack into "polled mode" to remove the overhead of interrupts to the overall operating system, providing better overall system performance, as well as providing faster network throughput to competing operating systems
• Enhanced performance at a lower system resource expense is achieved by tuning the vNIC's to more closely match the clients mean flow control can happen at the hardware or NIC card level (instead of forcing the flow control higher in the TCP stack)
• Modeling of applications and their performance can be done completely on a laptop, all application tiers, including H-A, without ever leaving the laptop - allowing architects to test the system performance implications by making live configuration settings
• Repelling DoS attacks at the NIC card - if there is a DoS attack against a virtual server's vNIC card, the other virtual servers do not necessarily have to be impacted on the main system due to isolation and resource management, and packets are dropped at the hardware layer instead of at the kernel or application, where high levels of interrupts are soaking up all available CPU capacity.

Usually, adding & leveraging features like QoS and Virtualization will decrease performance to an operating system, but with OpenSolaris, adding these feature with a substantial re-write of code, enabled a substantial increase in read & write throughput over Solaris as well as substantial increase in read throughput (with close to on-par write throughput) in comparison to Linux on the same hardware.
http://www.opensolaris.com/learn/features/networking/networkperformance/

This OpenSolaris technology is truly ground-breaking for the industry.

Usage of Network Virtualization in Network Managment

In the realm of Network Management, there is usually a mix of unreliable protocols (ICMP and UDP) with reliable protocols (TCP sockets.) The unreliable protocols are used to gather (ICMP, SNMP) or collect (Syslog) data from the edge devices while reliable protocols are used to aggregate that data within the management platform cluster.

While the UDP packets are sent/received, they can be dropped under times of high utilization (event storms, denial of service attacks, managed network outages, etc.) - so applying higher quality of service to these protocols becomes desirable to ensure the network management tools have the most accurate view of the state of the network.

Communication to internal system, which are aggregating that data, require this data for longer term usage (i.e. monthly reporting) and must be maintained (i.e. backups) - but these subsystems are no where near as important to maintaining an accurate state of the managed network when debugging an outage, which affects the bottom line of the company. These packets can be delayed a few microseconds to ensure the critical packets are being processed.

Enhanced performance in the overall TCP/IP stack also means more devices can be managed by the network management platform while maintaining the same hardware.

Implementation of Network Virtualization in Network Management

The H-A platform can be loaded up with OpenSolaris 2009.06 and the LDOM holding the Network Management application can be live-migrated seamlessly in minutes.
http://blogs.sun.com/weber/entry/logical_domain_mobility_between_solaris

After running on the production H-A platform for a time, the production platform can be upgraded, and the LDOM migrated back in minutes.

Conclusion

Operating systems like OpenSolaris 2009.06 offer to the Network Management Architect new options in lengthening asset lifespan, increasing return-on-investment for hardware assets, ensuring better system performance of network management assets, ensuring the best possible network management team performance possible.

OpenSolaris 2009.06 Release - What's On The Horizon

OpenSolaris 2009.06 Release - What's On The Horizon?

Sun has announced OpenSolaris 2009.06 as well as third-party news related organizations like The Register.

It is nice to see more features getting bundled into OpenSolaris!

OpenSolaris offered robust kernel and file system integrated CIFS for some time (something that no other operating system has done as well, besides Windows) - a beautiful thing for integrating Solaris, Linux, and Windows environments onto a single underlying file system.

Since OpenSolaris is the core infrastructure which the Sun Storage platforms are based upon, adding faster networking and processor enhancements (both CPU throughput as well as power efficiency) provides performance boosts for Sun integrated storage systems.

In the area of integrated storage systems, being able to release OpenSolaris under UltraSPARC T1/T2/T2+ means being able to leverage octal crypto engines for both encrypted network transfers of storage data as well as encrypted disk reads/writes for storage data. Additional performance on encryption from client to disk would give a great boost in performance to the storage line. If Sun decided that this would be of interest to the U.S. DoD. - an UltraSPARC T OpenStorage product would be sensible.

Seeing the inclusion of SPARC RocK code seems to indicate that the next generation silicon is moving forward, otherwise programmers would not have wasted their time including code for a processor that would not be released (to undergo another set of silicon revisions.)

Also, seeing OpenSolaris boot under SPARC is a good indication that Solaris 11 is right around the corner, since OpenSolaris is basically the Solaris 11 release. The GUI install integration of OpenSolaris for SPARC is tantalizing - this would possibly make Solaris 11 one release-away.

The only other thing the market would want, on a future wish-list, is full clustering integrated into ZFS (with Sun's acquisition of HPC clustered file system, it is just a matter of time.) One would hope the market will not have to wait until Solaris 12 to run a zpool command sequence to configure a clustered ZFS file system! :-(

What does this have to do with Network Management?

With wide-spread network management, the need for massive storage systems to hold historical data of ever larger networks drive the need for substantial and redundant storage. Technologies lke ZFS enables this.

The re-engineering of the TCP/IP stack in OpenSolaris is a tremendous boon to network management infrastructure. SNMP will be able to be leveraged more effectively for managed servers, TCP/IP stacks will be faster with better QoS on management servers, and integrated hardware acceleration in UltraSPARC T2 processors will provide management systems substantially increased performance in network management systems with multiple virtual machines.

With Sun historically targeting the Telecommunications Industry, it is good to see this focus has not deviated as Sun has reached out to Storage (purchase of StorageTek, Open Storage initiative, etc.) - rather it is good to see the convergence of the silos as it benefits all communities.

Oracle Licensing Update & Intel Conformance

Oracle Processor Licensing Change: Intel 5500 Series

In other blog postings (this, that), "Oracle Processor Core Factor Table" topped out on the 5400 series for the processor factor licensing discount of "0.5" with "All other multi-core chips" being tagged with a full price charge factor of "1.0".

With the release of the Intel 5500 series processors, the licensing had this new CPU family (with aggressively increased CPU throughput per core) had the factor falling under 1 processor charge per 1 core.

This had recently, and unceremoniously, changed. Oracle had provided this new quad-core 5500 series processors with the same "0.5" discount as the older multi-chip modules that Intel had been selling, for Oracle Enterprise Licensing.

See the bold-faced update below to the "Oracle Processor Core Factor Table"

Factor Vendor/Processor
0.50 Intel Xeon Series 74XX, Series 55XX or earlier Multicore chips

This is good news to the businesses which use Oracle Enterprise licenses, especially those businesses which hold a lot of data in databases, like Network Management businesses, where new data is acquired on 5, 10, 15, and 20 minute intervals on thousands of devices and stores for months.

Some Things Remain The Same: Intel Gets With The Program

This is the first real quad-core processor that Intel has produced, not using a multi-chip module - catching up to other vendors who have been in this space for years like Sun and more recently AMD.

While this does not sound like a significant change, in terms of existing Oracle licensing...

When licensing Oracle programs with Standard Edition One or Standard Edition in the product name, a processor is counted equivalent to a socket; however, in the case of multi-chip modules, each chip in the multi-chip module is counted as one occupied socket.

If applications in your Network Management Center are using Oracle Standard Edition licensing - this means businesses can upgrade hardware from older style Intel Multi-Chip Modules to the newer Single-Chip processors and get a significant increase in CPU capacity at the same license terms.

For example, comparing the licensing requirements in Oracle Standard Licensing for the newer single-chip Intel 5500 series against the multi-chip Intel 7400 series:

Series Cores Chips
7400 2 1
7400 4 2
7400 6 3
5500 4 1

In short, a (relatively new) single socket hex-core socket Intel 7400 platform (with 6 slow cores, being equivalent to an Oracle Standard Licensing 3 socket) can be replaced with a (brand new) quad-socket quad-core Intel 5500 platform (with 16 fast cores, being equivalent to an Oracle Standard Licensing 4 sockets.)

This may be a lot to absorb, but if you are using Oracle Standard Licensing on Intel, stay away from the old processors except in the smallest of configurations.

SUN and Oracle Synergies

SUN and Oracle Synergies

SUN has been producing computing systems for over 2 decades - and they have merged with a large software business.

A SUN Perspective

Sun made an announcement on April 20, 2009

Sun and Oracle today announced a definitive agreement for Oracle to acquire Sun for $9.50 per share in cash. The Sun Board of Directors has unanimously approved the transaction. It is anticipated to close this summer.

An Oracle Perspective

Oracle made an announcement on April 20, 2009

“The acquisition of Sun transforms the IT industry, combining best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system – applications to disk – where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up.”

An Outside Perspective

What does all this mean to Oracle and SUN Customers?

In some ways, things will not change much.

• More Oracle databases are deployed under Solaris than any other single operating system, according to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. It seems like Solaris is here to stay.
• The largest number of Oracle databases are deployed under SPARC Solaris, it seems like SPARC is there to stay.
• Oracle has embedded Java Runtime into the Oracle Database, so it seems Java is there to stay.
• Oracle has acquired other databases in the past and continues to develop them, so it seems MySQL is there to stay.
• Oracle is very dependent upon external storage vendors for their database, so it seems Open Storage is here to stay.
• Oracle is very dependent upon tape backup for data retention, so it seems StorageTek is here to stay.
• Oracle was heavily driving the thin-client idea with SUN for years, so it seems SunRay is here to stay.

In other ways, one would hope for some things to change

• Oracle has been over-pricing Oracle RDBMS pricing on SUN hardware, depressing SUN hardware sales, and giving business to IBM, who wants to migrate those customers to POWER & DB2.
  

This seems like a match made in heaven - things can only get better!

ZFS: Managing Storage for Network Management

Abstract

Network management systems normally require significant attention to detail regarding availability of data. The disk subsystem chosen for data storage can significantly enhance availability. OpenSolaris ZFS infrastructure provides one of the more robust file systems for secure and available data.

Introduction to ZFS

ZFS is a comprehensive system for managing data. It combines many of the features normally compartmentalized and commoditized by storage and system vendors into a single component. With ZFS comes the ability to provide:

• pooling of resources into volumes
• snapshots of volumes, for backup and restoral purposes
• serialization of volumes for backup and restoral purposes
• cloning of volumes for system or application duplication
• promotion of clones for new system or application installations
• compression of data for increased disk throughput and capacity
• single or double parity to compensate for 1 or 2 failed devices in a volume
• silent error correction for data corruption due to hardware errors
• sharing of data across clustered systems based in zones on the same platform
• sharing of data across to other operating systems via nfs or cifs
  
• sharing of data across to other hardware platforms via iSCSI

This article discusses a very simple implementation leveraging ZFS.

Preparing Disk Devices

Disks can be added to your system, and in this case, I will add a variety of small external SCSI disks to a controller 1. After adding the disks, the following commands are used to find those disks in the operating system and slice them for usage. Normally, I will partition disks so they are all the exact same size, the size of the smallest disk, so they are easy to find replacements for in case of failure.

Ultra2/root $ disks

Ultra2/root $ ls -al /dev/rdsk/c1*0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 55 2009-04-08 13:18 /dev/rdsk/c1t2d0s0 -> ../../devices/sbus@1f,0/SUNW,fas@1,8800000/sd@2,0:a,raw
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 55 2009-04-08 13:18 /dev/rdsk/c1t3d0s0 -> ../../devices/sbus@1f,0/SUNW,fas@1,8800000/sd@3,0:a,raw
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 55 2009-04-08 15:20 /dev/rdsk/c1t4d0s0 -> ../../devices/sbus@1f,0/SUNW,fas@1,8800000/sd@4,0:a,raw

Ultra2/root $ format
Searching for disks...done

AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
...
2. c1t2d0
/sbus@1f,0/SUNW,fas@1,8800000/sd@2,0
3. c1t3d0
/sbus@1f,0/SUNW,fas@1,8800000/sd@3,0
4. c1t4d0
/sbus@1f,0/SUNW,fas@1,8800000/sd@4,0

Specify disk (enter its number): 2
selecting c1t2d0
[disk formatted]

FORMAT MENU:
format> partition

PARTITION MENU:
partition> print
Current partition table (unnamed):
Total disk cylinders available: 3984 + 2 (reserved cylinders)

Part Tag Flag Cylinders Size Blocks
0 root wm 0 - 3980 2.00GB (3981/0/0) 4191993
1 unassigned wu 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
2 backup wu 0 - 3983 2.00GB (3984/0/0) 4195152
3 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
4 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
5 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
6 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
7 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0


partition> quit

FORMAT MENU:
...
format> disk

AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
...
Specify disk (enter its number)[2]: 3
selecting c1t3d0
[disk formatted]
format> partition

PARTITION MENU:
...
partition> print
Current partition table (unnamed):
Total disk cylinders available: 3981 + 2 (reserved cylinders)

Part Tag Flag Cylinders Size Blocks
0 root wm 0 - 3980 2.00GB (3981/0/0) 4191993
1 unassigned wu 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
2 backup wu 0 - 3980 2.00GB (3981/0/0) 4191993
3 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
4 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
5 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
6 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
7 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
partition> quit

FORMAT MENU:
...
format> disk

AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
...
Specify disk (enter its number)[3]: 4
selecting c1t4d0
[disk formatted]

format> partition

PARTITION MENU:
...
partition> print
Current partition table (unnamed):
Total disk cylinders available: 3981 + 2 (reserved cylinders)

Part Tag Flag Cylinders Size Blocks
0 root wm 0 - 3980 2.00GB (3981/0/0) 4191993
1 unassigned wu 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
2 backup wu 0 - 3980 2.00GB (3981/0/0) 4191993
3 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
4 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
5 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
6 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
7 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0

partition> quit

FORMAT MENU:
format> quit

Creating a ZFS Pool

ZFS has the ability to leverage resources stored in: disks, slices, or files. These resources must be included into a pool, in order for ZFS to gain access to them. The pool can be straight striped disks, mirrored, RAID, or raid with parity and silent error correction. This is done through the "zpool" command.

To create a pool "u000" of storage from whole disks using "raidz" (with parity and silent error correction), the following command can be executed.

Ultra2/root $ zpool status
no pools available

Ultra2/root $ zpool create u000 raidz c1t2d0s0 c1t3d0s0 c1t4d0s0

Ultra2/root $ zpool status
pool: u000
state: ONLINE
scrub: none requested
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
u000 ONLINE 0 0 0
raidz1 ONLINE 0 0 0
c1t2d0s0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c1t3d0s0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c1t4d0s0 ONLINE 0 0 0

errors: No known data errors

Ultra2/root $ df -h | egrep '(u000|File)'
Filesystem size used avail capacity Mounted on
u000 3.9G 24K 3.9G 1% /u000

Ultra2/root $ zfs list
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
u000 122K 3.91G 24.0K /u000

Adding Features to a ZFS Pool

ZFS offers a variety of features, including compression, to make the most of the capacity and throughput of a disk subsystem. Often, after parity is added to a RAID system, compression is desired, in order to redeem the space that was lost in the process of adding the parity.

Ultra2/root $ zfs set compression=on u000

Determining Failure in a ZFS Pool

If a disk in a ZFS pool fails and you are using some kind of redundancy (i.e. raidz) - then the status will indicate you have a failed device. In the following example, target drive 2 had failed in a 3 disk zpool.

Ultra2/root $ zpool status
pool: u000
state: DEGRADED
status: One or moredevices are faulted in response to persistent errors.
Sufficient replicas exist for the pool to continue functioning in a
degraded state.
action: Replace the faulted device, or use 'zpool clear' to mark the device
repaired.
scrub: resilver completed after 0h0m with 0 errors on Sun April 12 00:30:43 2009
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
u000 DEGRADED 0 0 0
raidz1 DEGRADED 0 0 0
c1t2d0s0 FAULTED 0 0 0
c1t3d0s0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c1t4d0s0 ONLINE 0 0 0

errors: No known data errors

Manually Replacing a Failed Drive in a ZFS Pool

To replace a failed drive in a zpool, the hardware must be replaced with a drive of equal or greater size. After the replacement is done, a clear command must be issued against the pool and device.

Ultra2/root $ zpool replace u000 c1t2d0s0

Ultra2/root $ zpool status
pool: u000
state: DEGRADED
scrub: resilver completed after 0h0m with 0 errors on Sun Apr 12 04:07:47 2009
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
u000 DEGRADED 0 0 0
raidz1 DEGRADED 0 0 0
replacing DEGRADED 0 0 0
c1t2d0s0/old FAULTED 0 0 0 corrupted data
c1t2d0s0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c1t3d0s0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c1t4d0s0 ONLINE 0 0 0

errors: No known data errors

Ultra2/root $ zpool status
pool: u000
state: ONLINE
scrub: resilver completed after 0h0m with 0 errors on Sun Apr 12 04:07:47 2009
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
u000 ONLINE 0 0 0
raidz1 ONLINE 0 0 0
c1t2d0s0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c1t3d0s0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c1t4d0s0 ONLINE 0 0 0

errors: No known data errors

Automatically Recovering a Failed Drive in a ZFS Pool

It is possible to set a property feature on a ZFS Pool so when a failed drive is replaced, the zfs pool will automatically recover. This is very nice for simplifying system administration - all that is required is to insert a new drive (of similar or higher capacity) inserted into the same position as the old drive and the system will automatically recover the pool.

Ultra2/root $ zfs set autoreplace=on u000