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Data De-Duplication Case C

Two of my clients have acquired a capacity based Netbackup license that includes, among other options, Puredisk.  Pure disk is a software based de-duplication application. 
In Case C, the smaller of the two environments, over the last two weeks of back-up, we have seen a total source size of 2.15TB.  The total de-duped pool is 1.04TB.  Giving us a reduction factor of 2X.  This 'factor' should exponentially grow over the coming weeks.

Coolthreads for Media Server

Below are the results from a test Sun ran using their new 2nd generation CMT based systems (T series) for a NBU media server compared to their UltraSPARC VI based system. There are many advantages to the CMT systems including acquisition costs, power and cooling and space.

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At a large Financial customer, we tested the T5220 against the our M5000 server. Here are the results of that test:

M5000 server with 10 T10K tape drives: 940 MB/s sustained throughput, 40 % CPU, $195/MB/sec

T5220 config #1 with 10 T10K tape drives: 940 MB/s sustained throughput, 25 % CPU, $65/MB/sec

T5220 cinfig #2 with 16 T10K tape drives: 1700 MB/s sustained throughput, 40 % CPU, $37/MB/sec

T5220 config #3 with 10 T10K tape drives: 1120 MB/s sustained throughput, 40 % CPU, $55/MB/sec

Puredisk Install

We recently installed our first Net Back-Up Puredisk 6.5 server and clients for one of our customers in St. Louis. The results have been as advertised from Symantec thus far. The initial back up of a windows domain controller to the Puredisk server and was around 400GB. The incramentals have been around 10MB. Or .0025%. More detailed results to follow.

Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog: The Continuing Rise of OpenOffice.org

The Continuing Rise of OpenOffice.org">The Continuing Rise of OpenOffice.org

The technology landscape shifted again yesterday, with another announcement between Sun and IBM - IBM has joined the OpenOffice.org community. Bluntly put, with only one (rather unlikely) exception, there is no more credible enterprise partner for OpenOffice.org than IBM. This is a big accomplishment for both teams - congratulations, folks.

At the risk of repetition... why are we (both) interested? Do we really believe the growing OpenOffice population will have an impact on the world's datacenters (where both of us make our living)? Obviously, yes.

The technology choices consumers make are already having a profound impact on how business runs. As an example, with 70% of the US economy driven by consumer spending (among the highest in the world) - when consumers spend, they are increasingly spending via the network. Using the devices, software and services they've chosen. Do I expect them to buy a datacenter through OpenOffice? No.

The choices consumers make, given their numbers on the web (here and around the world - in population centers, of course) are driving standards, from time-based video to applications and document standards. The technology industry is no longer the sole driving force - consumers are increasingly in charge. In the developed and developing world.

So our theory is simple. Free software, like free search or video, appeals to the broadest segment of the world's population - free is a universally attractive price tag (and a critically important intellectual property philosophy). One need only look to the recent successes behind the global rise of the ISO Standardized Open Document Format - appealing because of its price tag ($0), its complete freedom from tricky royalty, patent or technology obligations, and the ubiquity of products that support it (like OpenOffice, Google Apps, and others).

So what's driving OpenOffice adoption? Sun's endorsement? IBM's involvement? Google's support? Ubuntu's popularity? Its global community is enormously important, for sure.

But let me put it this way. I was with the CEO of a very popular internet software company recently, who said she felt it necessary to get her company's core product download to under 5 megabytes. I asked why- at more than ten times that size, OpenOffice downloads seemed in no danger of slowing globally, even to places with poor network infrastructure. Her response?

"My download doesn't save a customer $400." There you have it.

So get OpenOffice here, and tell your friends - if they'd like Microsoft Office compatible office productivity software, at home or at work or at school, they can get it.

Free.

In all the right senses of that word.

Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog: The Continuing Rise of OpenOffice.org

Ubuntu eating resources

Trackerd: every now and then (for no visually apparent reason), the fans on my Acer laptop kick in. If I look at the running processes with top, trackerd is right there at the top of the list sucking up my CPU resources.

This is a new feature of the O/S that I don't use. It would be nice if this process only ran when nothing else was running. After googling around, I discovered that there is a ~/.config/trackerd/tracker.cfg file that allows you to configure this application. Lots of great configuration options. Rather than throttling the indexing process back to 20, I just set "EnableWatching=false" to prevent watching of any kind.

What is eTude : Marc Hamilton's Weblog

What is eTude

This week, at Sun's analyst conference in New York City, Rich Green talked about a project we have referred to internally as eTude. So what is eTude and when can you get it? For those of you who missed Rich's talk, let me explain a little about eTude, or the Solaris 8 Migration Assistant, why we developed it, and who should consider using it. In order to describe eTude, I actually have to go into a little background on Sun's virtualization technologies and how they help Solaris users reduce cost and complexity in their data centers. So here we go.

When we initially released Solaris 10 in January 2005, we introduced one of the world's most powerful OS virtualization technologies, Solaris Containers. Solaris has for many years supported running multiple operating system images on high end SPARC enterprise servers with hardware domains. However, long before some of today's popular virtualization companies were even started, Solaris engineers recognized the need to bring virtualization to a much broader class of systems, so we developed Solaris Containers. Solaris Containers runs not only on our high-end SPARC servers, but on any SPARC server, as well as over 800 x86 servers from Sun, IBM, Dell, HP and other vendors.

According to various industry statistics, the average server today runs at somewhere between 5 and 15% capacity. That means you probably have a lot of extra servers sitting around in your data center, happily consuming unnecessary power and cooling. In most cases, however, you can't simply combine the software applications that two servers run onto one server without some sort of virtualization technology. There are a multitude of reasons for this ranging from application and OS constraints to administrative or security reasons. There has been a tremendous amount of information written about Solaris Containers, if you are not familiar with Solaris Containers you should visit the Solaris Container Learning Center before reading on. But the quick summary is that Solaris Containers virtualize the OS, allowing a single Solaris image to support multiple software partitions, or containers, that for the most part appear to any user or application as a separate copy of the OS.

To date, however, Solaris Containers have only supported applications that are already running Solaris 10. So Sun engineers developed something called BrandZ . BrandZ is a framework that extends the Solaris Containers infrastructure to create Branded Containers, which are containers (also called zones) that contain non-native operating environments. The term "non-native" is intentionally vague, as the infrastructure allows for the creation of a wide range of operating environments. So without going into the exact details just yet of how the Solaris 8 Migration Assistant works, it does utilize the BrandZ technology in Solaris to allow Solaris 8 applications to run in a Solaris 10 container. While many Solaris 8 customers have already completely migrated to Solaris 10, in part because of the legendary reliability of SPARC servers and in part because of our long term support model, we still have many customers running old Solaris 8 applications. Sometimes those apps are planned for near-term retirement and it doesn't make sense to migrate them fully to Solaris 10. In other cases the customer plans to migrate the application but has a shorter term need to reduce cost and complexity and would like to consolidate an older Solaris 8 app onto a newer, more efficient hardware platform. And that my friends, is the genesis behind eTude.

Unlike other virtualization technologies that may run an older OS without supporting it, Sun will fully support Solaris 8 applications running with the Solaris 8 Migration Assistant when the customer purchases a Solaris 8 Migration Services package, as well as the underlying Solaris support subscriptions. With over 5000 Solaris 10 applications shipping today, there has never been a better time than now to move to Solaris 10. Besides the Solaris 8 Migration Services, Sun has services and programs to help you migrate from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and other operating systems to Solaris 10. Of course Solaris Containers is just one of the many virtualization technologies from Sun that can help you reduce cost and complexity in your data center. Our CoolThreads servers support a hypervisor based virtualization technology called LDoms (Logical Domains) and we will soon introduce the Solaris x86 Virtual Machine (xVM) hypervisor for Solaris running on systems with x86 processors from Intel and AMD.

So, when can you actually get the Solaris 8 Migration Assistant? Well, if you are one of the lucky customers in our beta program, you are already using it. If not, you will have to wait until a bit later this year, when we officially release the product. Meanwhile, no time like the present to start planning, so contact your Sun account rep and ask for your own personalized Solaris 10 Upgrade Assessment, which can help identify exactly which applications in your data center could benefit from the Solaris 8 Migration Assistant.

What is eTude : Marc Hamilton's Weblog