Less known Solaris Features: CacheFS - Joerg Moellenkamp at c0t0d0s0.org offers another installment of his excellent Less known Solaris Features series. Of note: “In the recent days there was some discussion about the declaration of the End-of-Feature status for CacheFS which will lead to the announcement of the removal of CacheFS. After a few [...]
Prediction: Citrix will drop the open source Xen hypervisor for Hyper-V. The rest of the open source world drops Xen for KVM. - Lengthy speculation about the future of Xen now that Hyper-V is out. If this turns out to be correct, I think it leaves Sun in a particularly awkward spot, given that [...]
Chuck’s got another, uh, thought-provoking blog post up, More Examples Of Why Server Vendors Just Don’t Get Storage, surely intended to ruffle a few feathers. And he does raise some really good points: Most server vendors need more of an SSD strategy than just making a flash drive an option (it’s how you use [...]
There’s been a lot of noise from the storage industry about flash recently - in particular, noise from EMC and Sun, both of whom recently announced storage products using flash, EMC in January and Sun earlier this month. Below are my thoughts on what EMC and Sun are doing, as well as what NetApp [...]
Adam Leventhal’s Weblog: Flash, Hybrid Pools, and Future Storage - Excerpts from a forthcoming ACM article on hybrid (flash-disk) storage pools, including: “Flash should be viewed not as a replacement for existing storage, but rather as a means to enhance it. [...] By combining the use of flash as an intent-log to reduce write latency [...]
Jonathan’s Blog: Anything But a Flash in the Pan - Jonathan Schwartz on Sun’s soon-to-be-released (late this year) flash drives. Quote: “ZFS will transparently incorporate Flash into the storage hierarchy of a running system, using the microprocessor cache for the most performance sensitive tasks, DRAM for the next, then Flash, then disk (then ultimately [...]
Performance Isolation of a Misbehaving Virtual Machine with Xen, VMware and Solaris Containers - A paper comparing the ability of VMware (Workstation), Xen and Solaris Containers to isolate virtual machines from each other with regards to performance. Quick summary: VMware and Xen go one-two in protecting one virtual machine from another, and Solaris Zones [...]