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Technical best practices, derived from the real-world experience of Sun experts, for getting the most out of Sun solutions.
Many business applications requiring high availability, reliability, and performance have historically chosen either RAID 5 or RAID 1+0 technology for their data storage needs. While both of these RAID algorithms provide increased data availability, they are not without certain disadvantages. For example, disk groups using RAID 5 are only able to sustain a single drive failure. And disk groups using RAID 1+0 algorithms must use 50 percent of the available storage capacity for mirroring. These disadvantages are exacerbated as disk drive capacity increases. With larger disks, the RAID 1+0 implementation becomes increasingly costly.
Never before in the history of computing has so much attention been paid to the sheer cost of running systems. Over the last fifteen years, information technology (IT) promised to catapult businesses across geographical boundaries, accelerate operations to Web speed, and entice consumers to move from passive point-and-click browsing to active participation in civic, social, and consumer Net events. To capitalize on this potential, datacenters emerged around the globe—with huge server farms enabling enterprises and online communities to thrive and grow. As these promises were realized datacenters flourished, expanding to capacity and consuming more and more power per square foot. All of this success has come at a price.
Datacenter best practices for disk and network I/O are relatively well defined. Configure multiple data paths to network and storage resources to increase availability. For data reliability, use media redundancy including hardware and software RAID and sophisticated filesystems such as the Zettabyte File System (ZFS). These rules of thumb drive the way in which real-world datacenter servers are configured and cabled — but how do these rules translate into the virtual world? What does it mean to have redundant virtual disks and networks? How should they be leveraged to provide availability and reliability benefits similar to those in the physical world?
By Stephen Lawson
Sun Microsystems will introduce a storage appliance based on its FISHworks software package by the end of this year and later extend the technology to other types of products through partnerships.
FISHworks is a set of software components for building specialized appliances on industry-standard x86 hardware. Though it runs best on Sun equipment and the company's OpenSolaris open-source operating system, the software theoretically could work on other platforms, according to Sun.
By Daya Baran
Did you check out Google Chrome? Did you read the fine print? It is 11 pages long, 117 paragraphs, 375 line, 4,302 words and 25,801 characters.
by Sam Dean
In one of the more interesting reviews of Google's open source Chrome browser, released yesterday, AP technology writer Peter Svensson suggests that Google missed the boat by focusing on JavaScript performance in the browser, and submits that the real culprit behind much pokey web performance and many browser crashes is Adobe's Flash. Notably, Svensson's diatribe against Flash coincided with some interesting comments sent to us at OStatic from AdventNet/Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu. Vembu sees Chrome's focus on JavaScript as right on, to the point where it may begin to stifle Flash. Here's the gist of all this.
By John Leyden
The co-host of popular science television show Mythbusters has backtracked on claims that the Discovery Channel spiked a planned exploration of RFID security after coming under commercial pressure from credit card companies.
Previously, Mythbusters co-host Adam Savage told delegates at the Hackers on Planet Earth conference in no uncertain terms that a planned segment of the reliability, security and trackability of RFID had been pulled by Discovery. According to this version of events, lawyers for credit card firms jumped on board a conference call to discuss the technology between the Mythbusters team and made it "clear to Discovery that they were not going to air this episode talking about how hackable this RFID card stuff was".
by John Furrier
A couple of observations on Chrome: It's good, it's an OS, and where the hell is Intel. Multiprocess? Hello, multicore on the desktop. Hello, Intel? Wake up. I think that Google is being smart by not calling attention to the OS issue. Why? Because the definition of an OS favors Microsoft-and all the legacy baggage with PC-centric stuff. Why get into that conversation?
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