Ad: Manage updates with the Download App
ie8 fix

fishworks

Sun's Open Storage play: Do unto others...

Sun Microsystems spent a decade getting pummeled by lower-cost, commodity Linux servers. It wants to spend the next decade doing the same to its storage rivals.

I spent time talking with Sun executives over the past few days and was surprised by the intensity and focus the Sun team is bringing to its storage commoditization play. For years Sun has been (often rightly) derided for lacking focus and being stuck in a proprietary UNIX past. It has reorganized its business units as often as some people change clothes.

But I genuinely sense a different Sun is in motion now. With … Read more

Shouting at disks and Sun's Fishworks

I just ran across this video from Sun Microsystems that demonstrates a source of disk latency that we usually don't think about. It's short and quite amusing. Take a look.

But being the analyst that I am, I also wanted to highlight some of the pieces that make the demonstration possible.

The technology that's under the covers, measuring the disk latency and so forth, is DTrace, a component of Solaris, originally developed by Bryan Cantrill. By way of background, here's what I wrote upon its introduction in Solaris 10:

DTrace stands for "Dynamic Tracing" … Read more

Be vewwy vewwy quiet... I'm fetching bits!

We all know that conventional rotating hard disk drives aren't the sturdiest gizmos in the world. We're trained to treat our laptops gingerly when they're running, and many laptops are equipped with motion sensors that move the disk heads away from the data tracks if the machine is bumped or dropped.

But I've just learned that disk drives are more sensitive to minor vibrations than I thought. A blog post titled "Unusual disk latency" by Sun engineer Brendan Gregg describes how disk drives can go idle for relatively long periods of time-- over half … Read more