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I spent last week at the LISA Conference in Baltimore MD.  if you aren’t familiar with LISA, it is a conference focused on system administration.  This is the 4th  LISA I’ve attended in the last 12 years.

On Monday I attended a tutorial by Richard Elling on ZFS: A Filesystem for Modern Hardware.

On Tuesday I attended two tutorials.  The first was Jacob Farmer’s Disk-to-Disk Backup and Eliminating Backup System Bottlenecks.  The second was Tom Limoncelli’s Design Patterns for System Administrators.

Unfortunately on both Monday and Tuesday I had to spend a significant amount of time on conference calls helping to troubleshoot some work related issues, but the time I spent in all 3 sessions and viewing their materials was helpful.  I would definitely recommend attending tutorials by any of the 3 people above if they are teaching a topic of interest to you.

On Tuesday night I attended some (Open)Solaris birds-of-a-feather sessions.  There were a few times that people in the crowd were being belligerent towards a speaker (mostly complaining about the difficulty of finding information of various types), even though the speaker certainly had no sway over what the person in the crowd was upset about.  I don’t care how much money your company spends with a vendor, there is never a reason to be rude.   David Miner gave a talk about whats coming in Solaris.next and Ben Rockwood gave an entertaining and informative presentation on ZFS in the Trenches.

I was lucky enough to get a chance to talk with David Miner over a quick lunch later in the week and talk about the new opportunities and challenges with the OpenSolaris installation technologies.

On Wednesday through Friday I attended a mix of presentations, met with a bunch of vendors, and also sat in some of the ‘Guru is in’ sessions and talked with a number of conference attendees.  The highlights for me were:

• Werner Vogel (CTO of Amazon) gave a fascinating talk on the history of Amazon’s IT philosophy and infrastructure and how they evolved from a humble internal IT shop to adding a business which is the dominant  cloud computing provider.
• Elizabeth Zwicky’s talk on “Searching for Truth, or at Least Data: How to Be an Empiricist Skeptic”
• Bryan Cantrill’s talk on “Visualizing DTrace: Sun Storage 7000 Analytics”
  
• Talking with the folks from Splunk (awesome log searching analysis tool)

Adam Leventhal just blogged about a new form factor for solid state drives that will be announced soon called the ‘Open Flash Module’.  From the picture, it looks like the form-factor is based around SO-DIMM (commonly used in laptops).  I’m excited to see this since the most common form factor now is 2.5 inch or 3.5 inch drives that connect to SATA/SAS/SCSI/FC bays, which is great for compatibility (physical form-factor as well as drivers), but is a huge waste of potential density.  The new form-factor should allow you to have much greater density and boost bandwidth/reduce latency compared to current implementations.  One thing I am curious about though is the ability to hot-plug a form-factor like this which seems like it will be plugging straight in to a motherboard.

Update: Sun just posted more information about it here.  Initial capacity will be 24G with a 64M DRAMM buffer.

Here is a cool video showing that the sonic vibration from yelling at a high-speed disk can cause the latency of IOs to go up.
They are using the analytics from a Sun Unified Storage Server to show the info.

Update: I did some more research on the effects of vibration on hard drive performance.  It looks like a lot of vendors are offering technology to attempt to compensate in certain drives models, although it gets tougher when you are using 15k RPM drives.  Storage Mojo has a short post from about two years ago on the topic.

A co-worker had a question today about QFS that I wanted to test out. I didn’t have any machines handy that had free disk drives, but I did have a machine which had free space in a ZFS pool. It was simple to make some zvols to emulate block devices and created a QFS file system on top of the zvols. Here is what I did:

root@t2000: 415 # pkgadd -d . SUNWqfsr SUNWqfsu

root@t2000: 416 # zfs create -V 2g zfs/metadata
root@t2000: 417 # zfs create -V 2g zfs/data1
root@t2000: 418 # zfs create -V 2g zfs/data2

root@t2000: 419 # vi /etc/opt/SUNWsamfs/mcf
qfs1 10 ma qfs1 on
/dev/zvol/dsk/zfs/metadata 11 mm qfs1 on
/dev/zvol/dsk/zfs/data1 12 mr qfs1 on
/dev/zvol/dsk/zfs/data2 13 mr qfs1 on

root@t2000: 420 # /opt/SUNWsamfs/sbin/sammkfs -a 128 qfs1

root@t2000: 421 # echo “qfs1 – /qfs1 samfs – yes stripe=1″ >> /etc/vfstab

root@t2000: 421 # mkdir /qfs1

root@t2000: 422 # mount /qfs1

I’m positive my configuration wasn’t optimal, but it was very easy to get QFS setup to answer the question.

I just saw an annoucement about QFS being open-sourced, very cool indeed.