Starting July 15th at 9 am (local time in Brisbane, Australia - GMT +10), we'll be streaming the Kernel Conference Australia. Go to our UStream page for the live stream and to participate and ask questions via chat.

Of particular interest to the storage crowd: Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore on ZFS Deduplication! 9:15 am tomorrow. 

Want more Bonwick and Moore?
Join us for their keynote on "Deduplication in ZFS"
at the Kernel Conference in Brisbane, Australia,
July 15-17, 2009.

Bill Moore and Jeff Bonwick gave a three-hour tutorial on ZFS at this year's SNIA SDC. Here's the first hour, the rest to follow next week.

download ZFS The Last Word in File Systems Pt 1 for iPod

view part 2

Going on now at the Grand Hyatt in San Francisco. There's still time to join the live video streams, and, if you're in town, stop by to visit the Community Marketplace while enjoying a drink and a fantastic view on the 36th floor.

Announcements have certainly accelerated lately with respect to integrated infrastructure technology.  Multiple vendors who provide infrastructure hardware for compute, storage and network are either partnering with each other or pursuing a "go alone" strategy.  Few will disagree that more tightly integrated solutions will benefit IT customers.

However an IT solution has always had the expectation and requirement to be integrated.  That is why the IT industry has developed over the years standards and protocols.  In other words, common industry accepted methods to move, process and protect business as well as consumer information.  Traditionally large complex IT solutions have been integrated by VARs, management consulting firms or consulting services for a given customer.  Is that beginning to change?  Also the IT solution is comprised of more than just tightly integrated hardware blocks. 

Let's not forget about the various applications that need to run on any given vendors hardware platform.  In addition to the applications, virtualization is becoming a standard requirement to maximize the utilization of any vendors integrated hardware platform.  Infrastructure providers will need to adjust to the fact that hypervisor technology may sell less hardware because utilization and efficiency will be largely improved.

Does this new focus on consolidation favor software stacks that are both heterogeneous and therefore ubiquitous?  The IT industry has become a mature business.  New ideas will always continue but IT will still be comprised of both hardware and software. 

A good analogy is the automobile industry...  Automobiles have had tremendous amounts of progress over the past 100 years.  For example there have been many optimizations and efficiencies with car manufacturing, car fuel efficiency, etc.  Over the past 20 years the automobile industry has highly leveraged the use of embedded electronics in cars.  But the basic components of a car (tires, engine, brakes, steering wheel, etc.) have (and for the foreseeable future) not changed.

Blog is available also at: http://bobporras.wordpress.com/

Here is a demo of the use of ZFS Hybrid Storage Pools that I put together. Its quite neat in that it is reproduceable fairly easily. My thanks to Mo Beik for doing the heavy lifting.

Here is series of Brief Open Storage Demo's that I put together on various aspects of Solaris storage software such as ZFS, NFS, CIFS, iSCSI - just the basics to get you started.

I originally created them for SuperComputer 2008 and have only just rediscovered them. Enjoy.

Niall wrote a post to the zfs-auto-snapshot alias announcing his new time-sliderd implementation of the ZFS Automatic Snapshot service.

I'm looking forward to this new implementation: I wrote the old ksh-based code back in 2006 and have been adding features & fixing bugs ever since. Over time, it's started creaking at the seams - there were a few issues with it that were tricky to deal with in it's existing implementation. I've long felt the desire to start again, but just couldn't give it the time it needed. Well, Niall's done just that - many thanks Niall!

I've got commentary on the thread on the auto snapshot mailing list and have also forwarded Niall's announcement to zfs-discuss. The old README on this blog has been updated, with a pointer to the original heads-up message.

So now I get to focus on my day-job again :-)