Sun Previews Next Rev of Solaris 10

Published: May 4, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Sun Microsystems hosted its Network Computing 06Q2 announcement shindig in Washington, D.C., this week, and there are not going to be a lot of server announcements. In fact, there will not be any, so if you were waiting to see the next "Galaxy" Opteron servers, forget it. Sun is expected to make some storage announcements, and is also previewing the next snapshot of its Solaris 10 operating system.

With the 6/06 update to Solaris 10, which as the name suggests will come out in June to commercial Solaris shops, Sun is making good on some promised enhancements to its Unix variant. The most important one is the Zettabye File System, or ZFS. As the name suggests, ZFS is a 128-bit file system, which means it can address an utterly huge amount of data. No one needs to do this today, of course. But according to Chris Ratcliffe, director of marketing for Sun's Solaris software products, Sun is looking ahead. He says that the UFS file system that is currently at the heart of Solaris is basically 30 years old. "You have to develop file systems to be around for a very long time," Ratcliffe explains.

But ZFS is about more than addressable capacity and longevity. It is about making it easier for system administrators to cope with file systems that are growing at high double-digit rates. Storage capacity shipments across the industry have been growing in the 60 percent range for years across the entire industry, and grow much larger than that at some of Sun's accounts because applications have much richer data sets than they had even five years ago. And compliance regulations means more data of all kinds is being archived.

These days, you have a file system, which allows applications to talk to data, and you have a volume manager, which allows that data to be mapped to specific hardware assets like disk controllers and disk drives. This is the way it has been for years, and Solaris has its own UFS file system and Solaris Volume Manager to do these jobs, but Solaris customers often get file systems and volume managers from Veritas (just like other Unix shops do). But with ZFS, Sun is taking on this whole concept of duality when it comes to files.

"From our perspective, volume managers are a bug, not a feature. They are something you create to get around the limitations of the file system," Ratcliffe says wryly. In an example offered by Sun, it shows an administrator taking more than 40 minutes to do a relatively simple task: Take two disk drives, mirror a file system on them, create three user accounts, and add more space to those volumes later. It takes a page of commands to do this, and the operating system spits out pages and pages of output. With ZFS, it takes one command to create the mirror pool for the two disks, it takes one command each to create the three accounts, and it takes one command to add space to the pool that these three users share. ZFS is also neat in that with single commands administrators can put a storage quota on users, reserve a minimum of space for a user, and take a snapshot of a user's portion of the file system. Sun is also claiming "near platter speed performance" for ZFS, too, which is a big deal for Sun's financial services and service provider customers.

ZFS is also meant to be more reliable than normal file systems, and includes 64-bit checksums on all reads and writes. The checksum data is separated from the actual data, which allows for errors in the checksum data to not corrupt the actual data, which is called a "phantom error" or "silent error" in the file system lingo. ZFS is also endian neutral (which is has to be to support both Sparc and X64 architectures). Sun is not discontinuing its UFS file system.

You might be a little confused about the availability of ZFS, which Sun announced was ready in January of this year. At that time, Sun also announced that the Solaris Containers for Linux Applications, formerly known as "Project Janus," were also available. Actually, what happened is that these features were released to the OpenSolaris community. There is some delay between when the OpenSolaris community is done with the code and when it is productized by Sun. In the case of ZFS, this is about six months.

However, the Linux-based containers are still not ready for prime time as far as the commercial Solaris is concerned, and will not make it into the 6/06 snapshot of Solaris 10. According to Ratcliffe, the Project Janus containers are being updated so they can run more than Red Hat Linux binaries. Project Janus was one of the key features that Sun has been talking about for nearly two years as it was working on Solaris 10, which was released at the end of January 2005, and it was originally conceived of as an application binary interface (ABI) environment that essentially translated called from X86 and X64 Linux applications to Linux services into Solaris services on the fly with less than a 10 percent performance penalty. Now, the "Brand Z" project is taking this idea further and putting the ABI environment inside of Solaris containers, which isolates them in a sandbox, and Sun is tweaking the code so other operating systems designed for X86 and X64 platforms can run inside these containers in the ABI runtime. That means SUSE Linux is probably coming, and if Sun is a wiseguy, maybe a clone Windows environment. This updated container-ABI combo is expected "later this year," according to Ratcliffe, who would not take the bait on the Windows question.

Solaris 10 6/06 will have a number of other updates. The predictive self-healing features that Sun created for the Sparc variant of Solaris 10 are now available across any machine running an Athlon64 or Opteron processor from AMD--not just Sun's own "Galaxy" Sun Fire servers. Ratcliffe says that depending on the configuration, Sun's benchmark tests on these features have resulted in a 32 to 46 percent reduction in annual downtime on Opteron-based servers.

The 6/06 release will also have a version of the PostgreSQL relational database in the distribution, including some optimizations and full tech support from Sun. Further down the road, Sun will interface PostgreSQL with the DTrace system performance analysis features of Solaris 10, as well as weaving it into the predictive self-healing features and doing more performance tuning. Josh Berkus, who has been a member of the core team behind PostgreSQL for the past four years, has just been hired by Sun, in fact, and will be spearheading these initiatives through the OpenSolaris community.

Solaris 10 6/06 also has an SSL proxy embedded in the Solaris kernel, which can boost performance of SSL encryption and decryption by 30 to 82 percent without having to change hardware or applications, and also includes performance to the UDP and TIBCO protocols, the former being an alternative to the TCP/IP protocol and the latter being a protocol used in the Rendezvous application suite from the vendor of the same name. The 6/06 release also includes an update of the RealPlayer multimedia player, which is clearly of huge significance to enterprises--at least to their programming departments.

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