Archive for the ‘Fun’ Category

The Solaris Internals Virtual Shell Game

Monday, March 2nd, 2009

In a stark contrast to recent past when Solaris Internals was hosted on physical machines, we've just experienced one of the core values of virtualization -- encapsulated, portable state allowing geographic mobility. Solaris Internals has over the last two weeks been teleported out of my datacenter (As Jim notes, the ...

Saving Joules II

Thursday, November 6th, 2008

[ there was a bad youtube server hosting the first video, so here's a resubmit with a pointer to an alternative youtube copy It's been well talked up that consolidating physical systems can save a lot of datacenter engery -- for example, consolidating 20 systems, all with 3-5% utilization can reduce ...

Saving Joules

Wednesday, November 5th, 2008

It's been well talked up that consolidating physical systems can save a lot of datacenter engery -- for example, consolidating 20 systems, all with 3-5% utilization can reduce power by up to 10-15x -- or considered in more tractable terms, each server removed is equivalent to taking four cars off ...

Recharge my ride…

Thursday, July 24th, 2008

I'm jealous: http://teslafounders.wordpress.com/2008/07/19/tesla-founders-car/ Great to see the Telsa is finally shipping!

IO Challenge Update 3: 31,323 IOPS

Monday, May 19th, 2008

We now starting to see some of the more enterprise-league I/O rates... In contrast to the simple NVRAM cached 3 disk configurations used in the previous posts, we've moved to one of the more typical SAN based setups used for running the bigger applications. In this case, we now have ...

What happens when toddler curiosity meets ZFS?

Thursday, November 15th, 2007

It's always entertaining and revealing to look at performance statistics in the frequency domain. Since most performance anomalies are driven by some regular external event, you can often learn about what might be causing repetitive performance or response time patterns. Here's an interesting graph of the traffic to solarisinternals.com: The traffic ...

Dunking Krishna in the VMware pond

Tuesday, November 13th, 2007

One of our work-mates is getting married next week. Today he was subjected to a long-standing VMware tradition: getting married means you take a dunk in the pond!