SPARC-T3 Servers Announced!

Last week while at Oracle OpenWorld, the SPARC-T3 servers were announced! These are the third generation of CMT servers to be released. Three rack mount servers and a blade module were announced. These are all based on what was going to be called the UltraSPARC-T3 processor, but what is now called the SPARC T3 processor. The SPARC T3 processor has the following specifications:

• 16 Cores x 8 Threads = 128 Threads Running at 1.65Ghz!
• 2 x Execution Units per Core with 4 x Threads Each!
• 1 x Floating Unit and 1 x Crypto Unit per Core!
• 6MB of Shared L2 Cache
• 2 x DDR3 Memory Controllers
• 6 x Coherency Links for Glue-Less SMP upto 4 Sockets!
• 2 x 10GbE NIU Controllers
• 2 x PCI-E 2.0 Controllers -> 8GB/s Bi-Directional I/O Each!
  

Each server bares this as the model name with a single number following it representing the number of sockets. Here are the high-level specifications of the SPARC T3 servers:


One of the big changes with this generation is the removal of the 1 rack unit servers as they were being outsold by the 2 rack unit and above servers. This makes sense as most clients want the extra PCI-E slots and internal storage capacity. The T3-1B is meant for the Sun Fire 6000 Blade chassis and follows the standard form factor there. The T3-1 server re-uses the chassis for the T5240 servers. The T3-2 and T3-4 servers re-use the chassis from the Sun Fire X-series x64 servers. The most impressive change is the T3-4 server which uses the PCI-E PEM modules which enable hot-swapping of the PCI-E cards. The T3-4 server provides 16 PCI-E PEM slots to work with, which is more I/O slots than the x4800 server the chassis is based on! These servers are definitely designed to help customers take advantage of virtualization and consolidation with Solaris Containers and Oracle VM Server for SPARC (LDoms)!

While walking around at Oracle OpenWorld, I had a chance to take pictures of these new servers:







Some of the interesting features of the SPARC T3 servers that most people at the conference probably missed are:

• Integrated Graphics Console (15-pin VGA)
• RFID Tags on Face Plate
• Enhanced Power Management (Even at the CPU and Memory Level)
• More Hot-Swappable Components!

Already Oracle has released benchmarks using its middle-ware and database products to compare the SPARC T3 servers against Intel Nehalems and IBM POWER7 servers! This is really exciting as for the first time there are some real world benchmarks out at the server announcement release. This will go a long way to showing that SPARC can still pack a punch and compete even against IBM POWER7 servers!

In the next post, I'll talk about Oracle VM Server for SPARC 2.0!

Presenting at Oracle OpenWorld!

I'll be presenting as a guest speaker at Oracle OpenWorld! Here are the details:

Oracle VM Server for SPARC: Enabling a Flexible, Efficient IT Infrastructure
Wednesday, September 22, 13:00 | Moscone South, Rm 301

Oracle VM Server for SPARC (previously called Sun Logical Domains) provides highly efficient, enterprise-class virtualization capabilities for Oracle's Sun SPARC Enterprise servers with chip multithreading (CMT) technology. Oracle VM Server for SPARC leverages the built-in SPARC hypervisor to subdivide supported platforms' resources by creating partitions called logical or virtual domains, provides the flexibility to deploy multiple Oracle Solaris operating systems simultaneously on a single platform, and enables you to create as many as 128 virtual servers on one system to take advantage of the massive thread scale offered by the CMT architecture. Learn more in this session.

This will be a great chance to meet enthusiasts, engineers, architects, system admins, etc. that are interested in LDoms. This is also a great chance to learn about the upcoming features!

See you there!

Oracle Open World is Next Week! See you there!

Oracle Open World 2010 is next week, Sept. 19-23!

This is the conference to attend this year for developers, system admins, engineers, architects, etc. for Sun and Solaris technologies. I will be at this conference next week and looking forward to the exciting sessions on cloud computing, virtualization, Solaris, hardware, etc. I'll be posting pictures and impressions from the conference as the week unfolds. It's also a chance for me to visit my old city San Francisco!

I hope to run into some of you there at the conference and have a few drinks! See you there!

Cross Roads for OpenSolaris

As many OpenSolaris enthusiasts and users have learned, Oracle has changed the game for OpenSolaris. The tap as it were has been turned off and we are no longer getting code drops and updates! Oracle has decided to drop the OpenSolaris binary distribution in favor of a new Solaris 11 Express program that will be announced later in the year. Oracle will only do a code drop onto the OpenSolaris.org repository after an official Solaris update release. This means that we won't see any code drops until Solaris 11 goes GA and when there are follow-on updates. This definitely cripples things for users and developers of the OpenSolaris distribution until Solaris 11 Express comes out. We can only hope that Solaris 11 will be a cut of OpenSolaris with IPS and more of the non-open sourced components put back in.

In the mean time, there have been several developments. First off, several of the key Solaris developers have left Oracle to work for the likes of Nexenta, Joyent, etc. There is a new OpenSolaris based community call Illumos that has been created and will continue on the good work of replacing the closed source bits of OpenSolaris with new code that will be open sourced. This is being led by Garret D'Amore who is now working at Nexenta. The Illumos project will allow OpenSolaris based distributions to use a common source base for the ON core. I'm very excited about this project and look forward to joining in. This may provide the base of my own distribution if I ever get around to doing something like that:)

Another development is that there will be another distribution starting called OpenIndiana which will be announced tomorrow! Needless to say, the number of OpenSolaris based distributions is increasing! These are definitely exciting times and I expect this trend to continue.

Sun/Oracle ZFS and NetApp Patent Dispute Over!

Finally Oracle has put this issue to rest by settling with NetApp over the ZFS vs WAFL patent dispute. From what I remember this all started with STK going after NetApp over other patents, and then NetApp going after Sun over ZFS. Sun went after NetApp for Sun IP being used in NetApp products without any license. And needless to say this all became crazy and stretched on for a while. The last I heard was that Sun was able to show that there is indeed "prior" art on the whole "copy on write" and "write anywhere file layout" concept and that if anything NetApp could loose its own patents. Enter Oracle, and things go silent. It may be some time before the public finds out the details. But if I were to make a prediction, it is that Oracle got its legal army ready to take NetApp down and NetApp backed down and decided to settle.

So the good news is that all the FUD around ZFS is over! With ZFS being open sourced through OpenSolaris, it should be safe to assume that users of the source code are indemnified and protected. As a result, Coraid, Compellent, GreenBytes, Nexenta, etc. can all go happily back into the market place and sell their products without worry. This is great news! As anyone who has really delved into using ZFS can attest, it really is a killer product. Seeing how Oracle has dropped its HDS agreement and is using the 7000 series OpenSolaris ZFS based arrays in its ExaByte 2 product, that Oracle has big plans for ZFS. The need for expensive EMC, HDS, NetApp, etc products may be coming to a close. All of those vendors have been placing greater and greater focus on modular commodity storage. With out the custom ASICs and firmware, there isn't much to prevent anyone from turning a server with off the shelf storage and OpenSolaris ZFS into a SAN/NAS/iSCSI solution.

Oracle Solaris 10 09/10 (Update 9) Released!!

Oracle has released the latest update for Solaris 10 09/10! It is great to see that the Solaris 10 updates and patches are alive and kicking! I know there was some skepticism from many as to Oracle's intentions for Solaris and all I have to say is WAKE UP! Solaris is alive and well!

According to the What's New documentation, the following new features are available:

• Auto-Registration (For interactive installs and can be turned off)
• Install-Time Update (ITU) Tools Support for SPARC
• Solaris Zones Cluster Node Update (Via DVD or Jumpstart)
• Solaris 10 P2V Tool for Containers
• Solaris Containers HostID Emulation
• Solaris Containers zoneadm attach -U option for updating packages
• Oracle VM Server for SPARC (LDoms) 2.0 Dynamic Memory Reconfiguration Support
  
• Oracle VM Server for SPARC (LDoms) 2.0 Virtual Disk Multi-Pathing between Service Domains
• Oracle VM Server for SPARC (LDoms) 2.0 Static Direct I/O Support for PCI-E End-Point Devices for Guest Domains
• Oracel VM Server for SPARC (LDoms) 2.0 Virtual Domain Information (virtinfo) Command and API
  
• ZFS Device Replacement Auto-Expand Feature
• ZFS "zpool list" out-put enhancement "USED,AVAIL" replaced with "ALLOC, FREE"
• ZFS "keep" tag for snapshots with the "zfs hold" command to prevent ZFS receive snapshots from being over-written by source changes
  
• ZFS Triple Parity (raidz3) Support
• ZFS intent-log enhancements for performance and device replacement and removal
• ZFS pool recovery enhancements
• ZFS I/O process threads visible for performance metrics per ZFS pool in the global zone
• ZFS poll split support
• Fast Crash Dump - 2-10x performance increase in crash dumps with compression
• Intel Xeon 5500 Energy Performance MSR support
• Modern Disk Sector Size Support (512, 1024, 2048, and 4096 byte support) for newer hard drives
  
• iSCSI Initiator tunables for network response times
• Sparse Files Support for cpio command
• x86 64-bit libc string functions with SIMD SSE instruction acceleration
• Sendmail auto-rebuild feature for sendmail.cf and submit.mc
• Automatic Boot Archive Recover support
• net_access privilege now part of the "basic" privilege set
• x86 Intel AES-NI cryptographic support on Xeon 5600 processors
• New Language Support (South Africa, English Singapore, Chinese Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Bengali India, English India, Gujarati India, Kannada India, Marathi India, Telugu India, Tamil India)
• Solaris iSCSI Boot Support (Already present in SPARC OBP and some x86 iLOMs)
• iSCSI Acceleration over RDMA (iSER)
• New Hot-Plug Support for PCI-E and PCI SHPC components with the cfgadm command
  
• Adaptec RAID AAC power management support
• x86 HP Smart Array Raid Controller HBA support
• x86 Broadcom NetXtreme II 10GbE GLDv3 Support in bnxe driver
  
• x86 Broadcom HT1000 SATA Controller Support in bcm_sata driver
• x86 AMD SB700/750 and nVidia nForce 780a Chipset Support
• GNU Tar 1.23
• FireFox 3.5
• Thunderbird 3
• Less 436
• Bind 9.6.1
• GLDv3 Driver API Framework
• IP Over Infiniband (IPoIB) Performance Enhancements
• Infiniband OFED RDMA CM Kernel KPI Support
• Infiniband Performance Enhancements
• X11 Xorg setxkbmap dynamic keyboard switching support
• Intel Shared Code ixgbe support
• Broadcom NIC support for 5718, 5764, 5785 chipsets in bge driver
• x86 Fully Buffered DIMM Idle Power Management on Intel 5000/7000 Memory Controller Hubs (MCH) for Sun Fire x4450, x4150, x6250 servers
• Solaris FMA support for AMD Instanbul Based Servers
• Solaris FMA support for Netra CP3250 Blade DDR2 DIMMS
• Solaris VTS 7.0ps9 Updates and Enhancements
  
• Solaris mdb debugging enhancements for kmem and libumem

The Solaris documentation is available in the normal place.

Some of the interesting things you may have picked up on the list above of new features is the Oracle VM Server for SPARC v2.0 items. As you've probably guessed, LDoms is now called Oracle VM Server for SPARC. I'll always call it LDoms. If you click on the links in the "What's New" list, you'll see that the links do not work yet. However, this clearly shows that LDoms 2.0 is literally around the corner! The LDoms support features that are listed are things that I've seen pop up in OpenSolaris, not mention a ton of the other features that have been back-ported into Solaris 10. Needless to say, I'm very excited about LDoms 2.0 coming out and can't wait to get my hands on it. There is a session next week at the Oracle Open World conference that will talk about the next generation T-Series servers and another one on LDoms being presented by Honglin Su and John Falkenthal. Can't wait to see what will be presented there!

One of the things I did after downloading Solaris 10 09/10 was to look at the sun4v support to see if the UltraSPARC-T3 servers have turned up. Sadly, I don't see them in /usr/platform. I do see the following models:

SUNW,Netra-CP3060
SUNW,Netra-CP3260
SUNW,Netra-T2000=SUNW,Sun-Fire-T200
SUNW,Netra-T5220
SUNW,Netra-T5440
SUNW,SPARC-Enterprise-T1000=SUNW,Sun-Fire-T200
SUNW,SPARC-Enterprise-T2000=SUNW,Sun-Fire-T200
SUNW,SPARC-Enterprise-T3120=SUNW,SPARC-Enterprise-T5120
SUNW,SPARC-Enterprise-T5120
SUNW,SPARC-Enterprise-T5220=SUNW,SPARC-Enterprise-T5120
SUNW,Sun-Blade-T6300
SUNW,Sun-Blade-T6320
SUNW,Sun-Blade-T6340=SUNW,T5140
SUNW,Sun-Fire-T1000=SUNW,Sun-Fire-T200
SUNW,Sun-Fire-T200
SUNW,T5140
SUNW,T5240=SUNW,T5140
SUNW,T5440=SUNW,T5140
SUNW,USBRDT-5240
SUNW,USBRDT-5440

The mysterious T3120 is in the list, but I haven't heard any news on if it'll ever make it to market. I totally expect that the UltraSPARC-T3 servers will be announced next week and start shipping before the end of the year. I can't wait to see one and have a chance to take it for a spin!

One of the most heated debates that has emerged since the release of Solaris 10 09/10 is the change in the license. There is a lot of contention over it the following:

Except for any included software package or file that is licensed to you by Oracle under different license terms, we grant you a perpetual (unless terminated as provided in this agreement), nonexclusive, nontransferable, limited License to use the Programs only for the purpose of developing, testing, prototyping and demonstrating your applications, and not for any other purpose.

All rights not expressly granted above are hereby reserved. If you want to use the Programs for any purpose other than as permitted under this agreement, including but not limited to distribution of the Programs or any use of the Programs for your internal business purposes (other than developing, testing, prototyping and demonstrating your applications) or for any commercial production purposes, you must obtain a valid license permitting such use. We may audit your use of the Programs. Program documentation, if available, may be accessed online at http://otn.oracle.com/docs.

The gist here is that Oracle gives you a perpetual free license to use Solaris 10 if you are developing, test, prototyping, or demonstrating applications on it. For most developers, system admins, and engineers this is pretty simple. However, for normal end-users this can present an issue and possible gray area. I'm not sure what the answer here is other than to suggest that the enthusiast community of Solaris, OpenSolaris, etc. users contact Oracle to clarify this issue. Reading the rest of the license pretty much states that if you are using Solaris for production purposes, you have to buy a license which makes sense. From a business perspective, Oracle is giving you a free license ride for your development, testing, and QA servers and pushing the costs to your production servers. Typically, there are more non-production servers for most companies. The support costs for Solaris have also changed. Instead of the ~$240 a socket that it use to be, you now pay 8% of the net (discounted where possible) cost of the server per year. While I understand this may throw a wrench into the mix, Solaris support use to be cheap and Sun wasn't making enough money on it. So this is just Oracle being Oracle and turning something that is otherwise a cost center into a revenue stream. IDEAS has done an interesting write up on the Solaris support changes, an interesting read.

One last note on the license is that it's for Oracle Solaris, Oracle Solaris Express, and Oracle Solaris Cluster!! So this is the license that Solaris 11 Express will be using.