FishWorks 2010.Q3 release

A new major update to the FishWork appliance software have been released, 2010.Q3. This is the first release to support the new S7000 appliances released at Open World. It also contains bug fixes and a few enhancement, nothing exiting but it includes new Infiniband administration, better AD support, NDMP stream support and routing enhancements.

These are areas with bug fixes according to the release notes:

• device resilvering following failure and replacement
• snapshot management and deletion
• remote replication
• upgrade, factory reset, and rollback
• Active Directory interoperability
• shadow migration

ak-2010.08.17.1.0 Release Notes
FishWorks software updates

Another bright mind leaves Oracle

I can't say it comes as a surprise but another great mind is leaving Oracle. This time it's Jeff Bonwick, the man behind the slab kernel memory allocator in Solaris and more recently (together with others) ZFS. It is indeed disturbing to see that so many of the innovators from Sun, who stayed with the company thought terrible financial times are now leaving.

This means that most high profile persons behind Fishworks (S7000 appliance), DTrace and ZFS have left the red ship. Jeff Bonwick, Adam Leventhal, Bryan Cantrill and Bill Moore. There are of course many good people still at Oracle, but the people I have been following seem to be on the move.

Best of luck Jeff, I'm sure you will continue to break new ground somewhere else.

Free Your Mind,How a Small, Persistent Team Created a Revolutionary File System
Sun Engineer Jeff Bonwick is New Sun Fellow
Now it can be told (Slab allocator)

More Solaris 11 Express information

The first release of Oracle Solaris 11 Express will be later this year with a full release of Solaris 11 in 2011. There is not much more information on what this release will contain but it is probably a later build of OpenSolaris rebranded for Oracle/Solaris 11.

A interesting note is that Solaris 11 will be powering the new Exadata X2-8 and in the new cloud-in-a-box Exalogic .

Oracle Outlines Next Major Release of Oracle Solaris

New Fishworks release at OpenWorld

Server new products in the S7000 line of the ZFS based OpenStorage products from Oracle was released today. The smallest is the 7120 that comes with configuration from 12TB. The most interesting addition is the 7420 which comes in configurations up over 1PB with optional clustering and caches up to 1TB of RAM and 4TB of Flash. The X4470 or something similar is the Sun server what fits the specification of both the 7420 and the 7720 (which seems to be a in rack cluster version). It features 512GB of memory per controller and can support up to 32 cores just as the 7420. This makes my 7310 feel very even smaller. I guess this is the "Sun T4" I have been referencing earlier.

This is just various hardware configurations running the same OpenStorage software as before, we will see if there is some new features coming in an update to the software.

Oracle Unveils Next-Generation Sun ZFS Storage Appliance Product Line
Sun ZFS Storage 7720 Appliance

LDOM 2.0 released at Open World

Oracle today released LDOM 2.0 as Oracle VM Server for SPARC 2.0. This new released features better resource and power management but most importantly it now finally supports dynamic reconfiguration of memory. It should also support more flexible migration of domains in cooperation with Solaris (Cooperative guest migration) but it does not, as expected, seem to be the full live migration that we are eagerly awaiting. Oracle Solaris 11 Express is also mentioned as a possible OS for a guest domain, no news that it will work but interesting that it's mentioned. An the new SPARC T3 processor is of course supported in this new release.

Oracle Unveils Oracle VM Server for SPARC 2.0

SPARC T3 released at Open World

Oracle today released the SPARC T3 processor and four new systems ranging from the SPARC T3-1 with 1 CPU, 16 cores, 64 threads to the SPARC T3-4 with 4 CPUs 64 cores, 512 threads. No surprises, it the 16 core successor to the UltraSPARC T2(+) which we have been expecting since at least year, enhancements to the built-in crypto support and more cores but the same frequency and single-thread performance.

The minimal supported release of Solaris 10 is 10/09 which is good, I was afraid they would require the latest 9/10 update.

Update:
The minimal supported release seems to have changed in all documentation change to "Solaris 10 09/10", by wihch i assume they mean 9/10. This new way of writing the release name with a leading zero in the month part of the name makes it even harder to decode the name than just having two releaes named 9/10 and 10/09 and it does not match the name in /etc/release:

Oracle Solaris 10 9/10 s10s_u9wos_14a SPARC


SPARC T3 Processor
Oracle Unveils SPARC T3 Processor and SPARC T3 Systems
SPARC T3-4 SERVER Datasheet(PDF)
It's a UNIX system! New and Improved CPU support

Oracle Open World 2010

The first Open World since Oracles acquisition of Sun is here. Oracle likes focus their releases around Open World and we have already seen a new version of Solaris 10, 9/10. I guess that they will release SPARC T3, LDOM 2.0 (Or Oracle VM Server for SPARC) and hardware/software updates to the S7000(FishWorks) the next few days. If we are lucky we might also get some more information on Solaris 11 Express.

I will post as soon as something interesting surfaces.