SPARC T5 and M5 systems released

Oracle have announced new systems based on the new T5 and M5 processors. The T5 has doubled the number of S3 cores from the T4 and increased the clock frequency to 3.6GHz.

The M5 processor is also based on the S3 core (rebranded M4) clocked at 3.6Ghz but is has 6 cores and 48MB L3$. The M systems supports up to 32 M5 processor so a fully configured systems will have 192 cores and 1536 strands (hardware threads). The M5-32 have 32TB of memory in a single system.

Old and existing processors for reference:
T3 16 cores @ 1.65GHz 6Mb L2$ 1-4 socket systems PCIe 2.0
T4 8 cores @ 3.0GHz 4MBL3$ 1-4 socket systems PCIe 2.0

New processors:
T5 16 cores @ 3.6GHz 8MB L3$1-8 socket systems PCIe 3.0
M5 6 cores @ 3.6Ghz 48MB L3$ 32 socket system PCIe 3.0

Oracle claims 2.3x performance gain compared to the T4 with increased single-thread performance.

 All new systems both T5 and M5 supports LDOM (Oracle VM for SPARC).

Did everyone read that the M5-32 Supports 32TB of memory? No wounder they had to rewrite the virtual memory subsystem in Solaris 11.1

SPARC Servers

Solaris 11.1 available for download

Solaris 11.1 is now available for download from Oracle.

The usual SPARC/X86 [text|live|usb|AI] images are available as well as repository images. There are also pre-upgrade repository images available for those of you who are upgrading from 11/11 and have not upgraded to a recent SR or do not have a support contact.

Oracle Solaris 11 Download

SPARC T5, M4 and SPARC64-X

Short summary of SPARC processor information that was disclosed at Oracle world, in the near future Oracle will release two different SPARC processors and Fujitsu will release a new SPARC64 processor with support for LDOM.

SPARC T5 (early next year)

• 16 Cores 128 threads 
• 28nm 
• 25% increased thread performance to T4 
• 2.5x throughput compared to T4 
• Scales from 1 to 8 processors 
• PCIe Gen 3 
• 8MB L3 cache
• LDOM virtualization (as with all previous T-series)
• Solaris 10 update 11 or Solaris 11.1

SPARC M4 (next year)

• 6 cores 48 threads 
• Scales to 32+ sockets 
• 48MB L2 cache 
• 28nm 
• 3.6GHz 
• 5-6x performance per socket compared to M-series 
• LDOM virtualization
• 32TB+ memory configurations
• Solaris 11 only (but S10 support in LDOM)

SPARC64-X

• LDOM virtualization 
• 16 cores 32 threads 
• 24MB L2 Cache 
• 3 GHz 
• On Chip  DB floating point 
• Crypto acceleration 
• Runs both S10 and S11 in lab

Oracle forces wesunsolve to close

In another blow against the community and the people who work with or/and have interest in their products Oracle now has forced wesunsolve.net to close.

In the last two years it has been of tremendous value for administrators who find their support site hard to navigate and the a good overview of patches and updates.

I see nothing Oracle can gain by doing this, no patches where available only metadata with links to their own support site for downloads ( if you have an account with access to the patches ).

Since they already done a much, much worse thing by closing the OpenSolaris source this comes as no surprise. The way companies treat innovation and community efforts are important when you chose a operating system or database engine. Tell your sales representative what you think about these things.

A huge thanks to the people who put time and effort into making wesunsolve.net, it was very useful and will be missed.

wesunsolve.net

Upcoming SPARC CPUs

The upcoming Hot Chips symposiums "Big iron" session will feature two future SPARC processors:

"SPARC64 X; Fujitsu’s new generation 16 core processor for the next generation UNIX servers

16-core SPARC T5 CMT Processor with glueless 1-hop scaling to 8-sockets"

The SPARC T5 is expected to be built using 28nm technology and double the number of cores compared to the current T4 processor. The Sun Oracle server line should also include a 8 processor version, T5-8 which will then be have four times the number of cores (128) compared to the current T4-4 (32).

This session will be held August 29, hopefully more information will surface afterwards. Otherwise it would be a safe bet to say that we will know more about the SPARC T5 after Oracle OpenWorld in October.

The Register has an article about both the T5 and the M4: Drilling into Oracle's performance boasts.

Joyent presentations @ FISL 13

Joyent had a several speakers at the FISL 13 conference and presentations/slides are now available online.

Bryan Cantrill, Corporate Open Source Anti-Patterns: Doing It Wrong
video, slides
Bryan speaks his mind about corporate open source patterns with insights from Sun, the OpenSolaris project and Joyent. He does a bad job hiding what he thinks of Oracle ;)

Brendan Gregg, Performance analysis, the USE method
slides, video
Brendan on performance analysis using the USE method with good examples.

Update: Added Brendans video.

Solaris 11 / SPARC News

Here is a good summary of a recent online forum, "Solaris 11: What's new since launch?"

Solaris 11 Update 1 (late this year)

• Updated Virtual memory subsystem
This is probably what has been known as vm 2.0 earlier
•  Faster Solaris 11 updates with improved python performance 
•  Already running on the upcoming T5/M4 SPARC(R) chips
• VNIC configuration switch hosts with their zones

There are also hints on what future Solaris 11/hardware updates might bring

• Hotpatching similar to KSplice (Remember DUKS in Solaris 8?)
• Offloading of compression and Oracle arithmetics to CPU besides crypto
• Schedulers for DB or JVM workloads

Summary: What's new with Solaris 11 since the launch?

First impressions of Solaris 11 11/11

I have had a few hours to try the final Solaris 11 release, overall I think it is far more stable and polished than the previous "Early Adaptors" release. Besides the fact that I am unable to use semi-old SPARC gear to test the release since only the latest generations of hardware are supported I have found few real problem so far.

The new packaging system finally fixes what I believe have been the biggest problem for Solaris the last five years or so, it is now repository based and it is simple to install software and dependencies are automatically solved. No more hassle of downloading and installing multiple software packages from SunFreeware to resolve dependencies. This also makes packaging faster and safer, brining the whole system to a known level and always with a safe recover option since it is used in conjunction with ZFS clones.

Zones are a fantastic tool for security/workload separation and virtualization so it's good to see that so many enhancements have been done in this area. The perhaps most noticeable is of corse that they now also use the new IPS system for packages and that makes a vanilla zones very lightweight without the hassle of a sparse zone. NFS service can now finally be provided from inside a zone. There is a tight integration with the new crossbow network virtualization making is possible to limit bandwidth to zones, use DHCP in a zone without having a separate NIC and build internal networks between zones inside a single Solaris 11 instance.

Imagine the power and flexibility of an T4-4 with 256 CPU threads and 1TB of memory running 50 zones with several high bandwidth/low latency networks inside the machine with no latency or overhead caused by virtualization.

Unfortunately the X86 version with the graphical desktop seems to be somewhat unstable compared to the Express release, I think it's related to the upgrade of the X server. I have been unable to use my laptop with to displays with the final release.

Solaris 11 is however focused on usage in servers and it seems stable for that, I have only found one disturbing problem so far, sharing ZFS filesystems does not seem to work ( zfs set -o sharenfs=on), but you can share each individual filesystem with the share command. Sadly if you are evaluating this you will probably have to wait until next year when there is a full release of Solaris since no updates are provided without a service contract. If you work for Oracle this is something you might want to fix for everyone, or tell me what I'm doing wrong.

Solaris 11 have many other new features such as per-user encryption of home directories with ZFS crypto, a new mirror/raidz hybrid bloc allocator for ZFS, numerous security enhancements among other thinks. I have only named a few of the changes I will probably keep posting Solaris 11 stuff as I find something interesting that is not directly highlighted it Oracle own what's new documents.

Update: As pointed out in the comments sharing of NFS together with ZFS works a bit differently now. If you share an existing dataset you have to set the share property. However if you set the sharenfs property when creating the dataset it works as in previous versions of Solaris 11 Express, OpenSolaris etc. Move information available in the documentation here.

A new dawn for SPARC

I think latest news and release surrounding SPARC changes the economy quite a bit. You will now get Virtualization with LDOM and Zones, Solaris and management with OpCenter included in your support contract.

This comes as the same time as the SPARC T4 is released with is suitable for a wide range of workloads contrary to the previous generations on T-series. The new T4 systems are also much cheeper compared to M-series with the same amount of compute power.

The included encryption also seems to be the fastest currently available in a common processor, so you can get the benefit of encrypting your filesystem/database/network with a very small performance penalty.

Compared to a few month ago the list of good news is quite impressive:

• SPARC T4 with 5x the single thread performance of SPARC T3
• 2-3x times faster encryption compared to T3 (which already was fast)
• Live migration of LDOMs
• OpCenter included in support contact
• Live migration between T2,T3 and T4 in the near future
• T4 supports 256GB memory per socket (1TB for the 5U T4-4)
• A engineered system is available, the SPARC SuperCluster
• Solaris 11 will be released shortly

Compared to other virtualization technologies Solaris Zones has no overhead and VM for SPARC (LDOM) have no overhead for CPU or memory. Some presentations at OOW claimed that zones had 4x less latency than KVM and 15x lower overhead compared to VMWare.

The next generation of T-processor is also being developed and should arrive next year. They will double the number of cores to 16 per CPU. A possible T5-4 would have 64 cores and 512 threads in one 5U enclosure.

I know there is a lot of talk about supporting the whole stack, but you will have one single vendor to blame for problems with the server, virtualization and management. Perhaps more importantly it will not cost more than the hardware itself and the support contract.

First days of OOW

A quick summary of he most interesting news from the first days of Oracle Open World that are related to Solaris/SPARC.

• Solaris 11 is slightly ahead of schedule, it was supposed to be released by the end of the year.

• OpCenter is now included in your support contract for no additional cost, including virtualization!

• A new Oracle VM for SPARC will be release (3.0) that supports live migration between processors with diffent clock frequency and even between T2 and T3.

• Future releases of Oracle VM for SPARC will try to remove limitations, for example enable live migration while using dedicated PCI hardware in guest domans.

• Some work on Solaris 12 have already been started

• Solaris 11 will have more focus on virtualization/cloud

• SPARC super cluster will support exadata instances (one per T4-4)

Now i'm of to a new session, a deep technical review of the SPARC T4.

SPARC T4 information and Beta program

Oracle have announced an beta program för the upcoming SPARC T4 processor which Oracle perviously have disclosed should provide three to five times the single thread performance of current T3 systems.

"The aim here was to develop a processor core that would provide high-speed, single-thread performance while also addressing the needs of applications that benefit from the high efficiency and throughput of multithreaded cores. The SPARC T4 is up to five times faster than the SPARC T3 for single-threaded functions," says Rick Hetherington, vice president of hardware development at Oracle. "It's breakthrough technology for us."

This in combination with on-chip crypto acceleration, massive thread count and LDOM capability it looks like it will be the most interesting SPARC processor since the never released UltraSparc RK, Rock.

The new processor will also dedicate cores to critical software thread with a new Solaris API:
"The new systems use "critical thread API", or the ability of the Solaris operating system to recognize critical threads in applications and assign them, by themselves, to a single processor core. This allows the critical threads to run at the very highest performance levels without competing with other less critical threads. This delivers faster overall performance by accelerating the more critical components in threaded applications. "

Hopefully these advancements, at least in combination, will deliver broader on the T2/T3 promise of massive throughput without sacrificing or be limited by single thread performance. This would then make the T4 a very suitable general purpose processor with the advantages of handling massive amounts of load.

Be the First to Test Next-Gen SPARC Systems
Conversations with Oracle Innovators, Rick Hetherington
What's Inside the New SPARC T-Series Processors?
Oracle SPARC roadmap

Oracle/Fujitsu expands SPARC partnership

Oracle and Fujitsu are expanding their partnership to help the development of the next generation of M-series servers. This will be done by increasing the joint engineering effort of the SPARC platform. Sale teams from both companies will also cooperate in selling SPARC Enterprise servers.

This gives credibility to why the roadmap had M-series represented even in 2014, it looks like we are going to see some large SPARC iron the next few years.

Fujitsu and Oracle Strengthen Decades-Long Relationship

Solaris 11 Express support repo

If you have a valid support contract with Oracle it is now possible to generate certificates for the Solaris 11 Express support repository.

It's the same process as with OpenSolaris extra and support repositories but the location differs. Login using your My Oracle Account and generate certificates here:

https://pkg-register.oracle.com

Two Solaris releases for the T4 in 2011?

Solaris 11 is not the only Solaris release we can expect to see in 2011. The next update of Solaris 10, update 10 or Oracle Solaris 10 8/11 which seems to be what Oracle are aiming for in both name and release date is also coming in 2011. Earlier posts have included some of the expected content but the name and release window recently surfaced.

I found this in a publicly available bug report:

                Oracle Solaris 10 8/11 s10x_u10wos_02 X86
Copyright(c) 2010, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
                    Assembled 22 November 2010
     Early Access Build for Evaluation and Test Purposes Only.
         NOT SUPPORTED FOR PRODUCTION USE.  Not patchable.

With the 8/11 target it seems that Oracle wants to release the update in time before Oracle World 2011, perhaps to have a new Solaris release to talk about in the sessions but it also seem likely that it will support the upcoming SPARC T4 (Yosemite Falls) processor that could be launched at the same time ( Oracles road maps have pointed to the second half of 2011 and Rick Hetherington stated in the recent interview that it was less than 12 month away ).

Another interesting thing is that in the Oracle roadmap, Solaris 11 was plotted at the same time as the SPARC T4, sometime in the second half of 2011. Could this mean both Solaris 11 and Solaris 10 8/11 will be released at the same time and at Oracle world 2011? Given all the announcement at last Oracle world it would make sense.

Take a look at the slides of John Fowler, Executive Vice President of Systems, page 8 for the roadmap.

This gives some more substance to Fowlers statement that they will continue to produce Solaris 10 updates for some time, the timeframe for the release was probably not very hard to guess but it is interesting that there now seems to be a preliminary name. It looks like next year will be an interesting year for both Solaris and SPARC.

Here is some information on some of the expected content of the update:
Solaris 10 update 10 update

Two more well known ZFS developers quit

Previously since the Oracle acquisition the father of ZFS Jeff Bonwick and the co-lead in the project Bill more have left the company.

I know that the ZFS is created by a team but I had missed that another two well known developes also have left Oracle and joined DTrace creator Adam Leventhal at Delphix. This time it is George Wilson and Matthew Arhens.

Delphix welcomes Matt Ahrens and George Wilson:
"George and Matt bring an amazing knowledge of ZFS — the lower, and upper halves respectively — and are also just great engineers who are already contributing tangibly to the the success of Delphix."

Best of luck all three and Delphix. I hope Oracle has or finds people to finish the remaining large development areas of ZFS such as the block pointer rewrite project which I know Matthew have worked with.

Adam Leventhal also quits Oracle

Another bright mind leaves Oracle

Solaris 11 Express released!

I will post updates to this meanwhile it's available for download here:

www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/overview/index.html

What's new documentation is here:
www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/documentation/solaris-express-whatsnew-201011-175308.pdf>

Live Solaris 11 streams from Lisa 2010 tonight

There will be a Solaris 11 live stream from LISA 2010 tonight. The topics will include the new packaging system IPS, ZFS, Network virtualization (crossbow, can they still call it that externally?), Solaris zones and security. The selection of speakers looks promising.

Here is the agenda (TZ: PTS, UTC/GMT -8):

• 9:00 - 9:30 am - Introduction to Oracle Solaris 11 Express, by Markus Flierl
• 9:30 - 11:00 am - Image Packaging System, by Bart Smaalders
• 11:00 am - 12:30 pm - Deploying Oracle Solaris 11 in the Enterprise, by Dave Miner
• 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm - LUNCH BREAK
• 1:30 pm - 2:30 pm - Advances in Solaris Networking with Crossbow and Beyond, by Nicolas Droux
• 2:30 pm - 3:00 pm - Oracle Solaris Containers in Oracle Solaris 11 Express, by Dan Price
• 3:00 pm - 3:15 pm - BREAK
• 3:15 pm - 4:15 pm - ZFS Features in Oracle Solaris Express, by Cindy Swearingen
• 4:15 pm - 4:45 pm - New Security Features in Oracle Solaris 11 Express, by Glenn Faden
• 4:45 pm - 5:30 pm - Deploying Applications Using SMF and Other Solaris 11 Features, by Liane Praza
• 5:30 pm - 6:30 pm - Beer and Snacks Reception for ALL

Update: Here is a direct link to the stream: www.ustream.tv/channel/solaris-summit-at-lisa10

Oracle Solaris Summit will be streaming live at LISA 2010!
Large Administration System Admministartion (LISA) 2010

McNealy about Java and Capitalism

Scott McNealy held a keynote at the PostgreSQL database conference. He discussed the Sun acquisition, Java and capitalism. He highlights the points that Sun was trying to do "good" by sharing and working with the community and make money, while Oracle is focuses more on the money part and not so much on sharing.

"Sun was a company of "good capitalists," McNealy said -- implying virtuous as well as effective -- while Ellison is a "great capitalist." The end result is that "he's there and I'm here," meaning Ellison is still running Oracle and McNealy is without a job."

And

""Sharing's not Larry's middle name," McNealy said. But developers can always take the code for open-source projects and fork it into other projects, something he predicted will happen with both OpenSolaris and Java."

Read the full article at computerworld:
Scott McNealy talks Java, Oracle and Larry Ellison

Both Mike and Brendan quits Oracle

The last of the tree DTrace creators are now leaving Oracle, Mike Shapiro, who also was part of the FishWorks core team. Another member of the FishWorks team was Brendan Greg who also resigned from Oracle. Those of you who didn't now about Bredan before probably got to know who he was when he became famous for screaming at disks in a online video.

DTrace and ZFS is the core foundation of the S7000 storage appliance, now the whole team who invented DTrace is gone and so are the two core persons behind ZFS, Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore.

There are a lot of other great people behind these products, but the ones listed above are rare and extremly talented engineers and have all been part of breaking new ground in their area of expertice. The FishWorks team even created a usable web interface, a rare thing comming from Sun.

Mike Shapiro: End of file
Brendan Gregg: G'Day and Goodbye
Brendan Gregg screaming, Unusual disk latency
FishWorks, Now it can be told

Nexenta OpenStorage summit

Next week Nexenta will be hosting it's first annual OpenStorage summit in Palo Alto, CA. Besides obvious speakers such as Evan Powell, CEO of Nexenta several people from the ZFS/OpenSolaris community will also be speaking:

Bill Moore, Ex-Sun ZFS Co-creator
Jeff Bonwick, Ex-Sun creator of ZFS
Ben Rockwood, director of systems at Joyent.

Nexenta is as you probably know an OpenStorage vendor which builds it's storage appliance on top of ZFS. They are probably part of the reason Oracle cut the cord on the OpenSolaris source since their product competed with Oracles own OpenStorage appliances, which also are built on ZFS. Nexenta plans to continue to develop the ZFS/OpenSolais source and are sponsors of the illumos project which is the de-facto development gate of the OpenSolaris source now.

It will be interesting to see how they plan to handle the fork of ZFS now that Oracle have continued their development internally, ZFS have gained bug fixes but more importantly new features in newer versions of the on-disk format. If Nexenta plans to enhance ZFS to a degree that requires new version of the pool the two implementations will no longer be compatible.

Nexenta will fall behind Oracle Solaris/Oracle OpenStorage in terms of ZFS features, at least for a while. Oracle has plenty of source already created for ZFS which is yet to be integrated in their Solaris Next source, one of them is the BP rewrite project which has been in the making for years, another is ZFS on-disk encryption which has already been integrated into the internal Solaris gate at Oracle

Will Nexenta sit out and hope for the ZFS source to be released after Solaris 11 (late next year at the earliest) or will the make larger enhancements by their own. Both scenarios are possible while i doubt Nexenta will sit and await for Oracle. The ZFS code already released is stable and contains features not yet integrated into Nexenta products. New development is also possible, especially since several key persons behind ZFS have left Oracle and there are other developers, especially with a company found the development.

In the end this will affect all users of ZFS which are not Oracle customers, Nexenta and illumos are probably where future free ZFS development will be done. All users who want's a free OS with the latest possible ZFS bits are going to be using Nexenta Core or OpenIndiana or some other distribution based on the illumos source.

Nexenta announces first summit
Nexenta announces final agenda and sponsors for its first annual OpenStorage summit