Tuesday, April 23, 2013

ZFS Analytics

While woking with ZFS performance I created a dashboard to get a good overview with lots of different statistics. It's powered by Dtrace, python and graphite. There is a high level of detail but still easy to correlate different statistics.

It feels almost like fishworks analytics lite but without advanced features such as drill-down and heat maps. An example from a box running OpenIndiana:



You get a good view of how the layers interact, the latency for reads in ZFS compared to reads in from the physical disks, average latency, maximum latency, average read size and see how much more data ZFS reads form prefetch including hit rate etc.

I based this on the iomon dtrace script with some glue to send it into graphite, I also added ARC statistics and CPU/Network statistics. ( There is a iomon-graphite effort available on the web but that did not give me correct statistics and did not include things like CPU and network utilization ).

iomon.d

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

SPARC T5 and M5 systems released

Oracle have announced new systems based on the new T5 and M5 processors. The T5 has doubled the number of S3 cores from the T4 and increased the clock frequency to 3.6GHz.

The M5 processor is also based on the S3 core (rebranded M4) clocked at 3.6Ghz but is has 6 cores and 48MB L3$. The M systems supports up to 32 M5 processor so a fully configured systems will have 192 cores and 1536 strands (hardware threads). The M5-32 have 32TB of memory in a single system.

Old and existing processors for reference:
T3 16 cores @ 1.65GHz 6Mb L2$ 1-4 socket systems PCIe 2.0
T4 8 cores @ 3.0GHz 4MBL3$ 1-4 socket systems PCIe 2.0

New processors:
T5 16 cores @ 3.6GHz 8MB L3$1-8 socket systems PCIe 3.0
M5 6 cores @ 3.6Ghz 48MB L3$ 32 socket system PCIe 3.0

Oracle claims 2.3x performance gain compared to the T4 with increased single-thread performance.

 All new systems both T5 and M5 supports LDOM (Oracle VM for SPARC).

Did everyone read that the M5-32 Supports 32TB of memory? No wounder they had to rewrite the virtual memory subsystem in Solaris 11.1

SPARC Servers

Saturday, February 23, 2013

T5,M4 and Athena support in S10U11

The kernel patch for Solaris 10 update 11 show support for several new platforms: SPARC T5, SPARC M4 and the Fujitsu Athena (SPARC64-X).

7086173 Solaris support for SPARC M4 platforms
7086179 Solaris support for SPARC T5 platforms
7124696 Solaris support for Athena processor
7142242 Solaris support for Fujitsu's SPARC64-X Athena platforms


The Oracle SPARC T5 and M4 processors are unannounced when I write this but the T5 are expected early 2013.

getupdates.oracle.com/readme/147147-26

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

LDOM 3.0, T5 and M10

The release notes for LDOM 3.0 confirms what we already knew, logical domains will be supported not only on upcoming SPARC T5 systems but also on the new generation for Fujitsu SPARC Server, M10.

"To enable all the OracleVM Server for SPARC 3.0 features, you must run the required 
system firmware versions on the following platforms:
 
UltraSPARC T2 server Run at least version 7.4.2 of the system firmware.
UltraSPARC T2 Plus server Run at least version 7.4.2 of the system firmware.
SPARC T3 server Run at least version 8.2.1.b of the system firmware.
SPARC T4 server Run at least version 8.2.1.b of the system firmware.
SPARC T5 server Use any installed version of the system firmware.
 
This firmware is preinstalled on the SPARC T4 and SPARC T5 servers. The required firmware
for Fujitsu M10 systems is preinstalled on your system. For information about the required
Oracle Solaris OS version, see “Required and Recommended Oracle Solaris OS Versions” on
page 12."
 
The new SPARC M10 systems can now be seen on Fujitsus site (English translation).
From the Register:  Fujitsu launches 'Athena' Sparc64-X servers in Japan

Sunday, February 10, 2013

Solaris 10 1/13 released

The last update of Solaris 10 has now been released, update 11. The final name of the release is Solaris 10 1/13 and not 8/12 as plans earlier indicated. This is probably due to the upcoming SPARC T5 systems, to have the releases close in time. Supports the latest and greatest X86 systems, SPARC M-series, SPARC T4/T5 while still working fine on my 15 year old Ultra 2.
  • Live Upgrade and Zone Preflight checkers 
  • Install and boot from iSCSI 
  • pkgdep command
  • SSH, SCP, and SFTP Speed Improvements 
  • USB 3 Support 
  • Support for new hardware
  • Enhanced FMA (AMD,Intel)
  • Samba 3.6.8 with SMB2 support
Solaris 10 has full support for another five years and extended support until 2021.

Oracle Solaris 10 Downloads
Oracle Solaris 10 1/13 What's New