Cloud computing has been one of the most discussed topic over the year, and the discussion is not over because what is really being discussed is the way we will access computing an storage resources in the future. Even famous French intellectuals are giving their opinion and making predictions. Future will decide on predictions's accuracy.

What is usually less discussed is the technology behind cloud-computing, though this is no secret that virtualization is playing a key role. Cloud data-centers will be loaded with virtual machines each of these machines potentially requiring in disk-space what a complete operating system (OS) requires, which can go up to many gigabytes. How much disk-space does a virtual machine image (vdi) really consum? The only good answer is: too much. Too much because the OS is part of the infrastructure as …

Cloud computing has been one of the most discussed topic over the year, and the discussion is not over because what is really being discussed is the way we will access computing an storage resources in the future. Even famous French intellectuals are giving their opinion and making predictions. Future will decide on predictions's accuracy.

What is usually less discussed is the technology behind cloud-computing, though this is no secret that virtualization is playing a key role. Cloud data-centers will be loaded with virtual machines each of these machines potentially requiring in disk-space what a complete operating system (OS) requires, which can go up to many gigabytes. How much disk-space does a virtual machine image (vdi) really consum? The only good answer is: too much. Too much because the OS is part of the infrastructure as …

Network.com setup in Vegas, Thumper disk bay, green by Shawn Ferry

As I expected it would, the fact that I used ZFS compression on our MySQL volume in my little OpenSolaris experiment struck a chord in the comments. I chose gzip-9 for our first pass for a few reasons:

1. I wanted to see what the “best case” compression ratio was for our dataset (InnoDB tables)
2. I wanted to see what the “worst case” CPU usage was for our workload
3. I don’t have a lot of time. I need to try something quick & dirty.

I got both those data points with enough granularity to be useful: a 2.12X compression ratio over a …

Pimp My Drive by Richard and Barb

There’s remarkably little information online about using MySQL on ZFS, successfully or not, so I did what any enterprising geek would do: Built a box, threw some data on it, and tossed it into production to see if it would sink or swim.

I’m a Linux geek, have been since 1993 (Slackware!). All of SmugMug’s datacenters (and our EC2 images) are built on Linux. But the current state of filesystems on Linux is awful, and …