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 …

I thought I'd share a note I sent earlier in the week to Sun's leaders - about the turmoil we're seeing in the markets, and how I want our team focusing their efforts.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Begin forwarded message:
From: Jonathan Schwartz
Date: September 30, 2008 12:02:29 AM PDT
To: All Sun
Subject: Headlines, Financial Crisis, etc.

You can't have missed today's headlines - the American Congress failed to pass a critical bill authorizing the Treasury to put a floor under the US banking sector. The market swooned, and politicians in the US, and across the world, are bickering over the right long term answer - jump in and take action to save the troubled institutions, or step aside and …

UPDATE at bottom.

I just wanted to extend my congratulations to the team at Greenplum, and our joint customers at Fox Interactive Media - the folks behind MySpace, Photobucket, IGN, FOXSports.com, and a whole series of web properties that together represent one of the single largest audiences on the web.

All three of us announced today that Fox is running a massive production data warehouse built atop Greenplum's data warehousing software on Sun's Solaris/ZFS based OpenStorage platforms (a sea of Thumpers, to be specific). That is to say, open source software is at the core of one of the world's largest - and most affordable - data warehouses.

…

Recently I am been testing few pieces of Storage projects of OpenSolaris with PostgreSQL. One of tests involves using an iSCSI disk  with PostgreSQL.  Unfortunately the storage that's available is  in Colorado  while my PostgreSQL server is  located in Massachusetts. Latency will definitely be one of my top problems since storage  is halfway across the country (in Colorado). Plus the fact that I will be running a database server on my end  doesn't really sound like a good idea. Come to think about it, this could be a more common problem nowadays since Cloud Storage (for example Amazon S3 Webservice ) could be  optimistically  half way across the country and pessimistically be on the other side of the world.

 So what are my options to solve such problems?  …

It's been over a month (and three hurricanes in America) since I've posted a blog. More than a few of you've noticed - thanks for the prodding...

It's been a busy summer, on nearly every front. Customer activity hasn't slowed down, and the good news surrounding the (otherwise unfortunate) economic crisis embroiling many customers (especially those in the financial services industry, a heavy concentration for Sun) is that it's whipping up the winds of change. Customers facing spending pressure, or tiring of vendor price increases have new options, and there's a new appetite to explore those options (nothing like mandates from the CEO to reduce spending by 50%).

One of my more interesting recent meetings wasn't with a customer, though, it was with an equity analyst from a global financial institution. Equity analysts publish research that feeds the investment community - their (free) research and financial analysis accompanies …

I just bumped into the Sun BluePrints Wiki and I think it is worth a visit. It is a companion to the BluePrints Blog and part of the move towards Self-Published Content at Sun, which increases agility and responsiveness to user's needs.

The Recent Content page lists chronologically the latest changes. The more recent entries are created in Wiki format, while the earlier ones are PDF attachments.

Some of the documents that caught my attention include:

At the Red Hat Summit I was able to grab sometime with Chander Kant, CEO of open source back-up provider, Zmanda.

I had previously met Chander at the MySQL conference where they were named a partner of the year, but we didn't get a chance to talk much.  It was pretty cool to hear about how he originally identified the opportunity for Zmanda and then built a business around it.

My interview with Chander (13:27)  Listen ( …

At the Red Hat Summit I was able to grab sometime with Chander Kant, CEO of open source back-up provider, Zmanda.

I had previously met Chander at the MySQL conference where they were named a partner of the year, but we didn't get a chance to talk much.  It was pretty cool to hear about how he originally identified the opportunity for Zmanda and then built a business around it.

My interview with Chander (13:27)  Listen …

At the Red Hat Summit I was able to grab sometime with Chander Kant, CEO of open source back-up provider, Zmanda.

I had previously met Chander at the MySQL conference where they were named a partner of the year, but we didn't get a chance to talk much.  It was pretty cool to hear about how he originally identified the opportunity for Zmanda and then built a business around it.

My interview with Chander (13:27)  Listen …

The next release of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard, will have ZFS enabled by default. There’s a good article for the masses, at ZDNet on ZFS on Snow Leopard - do read it.

We all know running any form of server using HFS+ tends to be a bit of a joke. So, Snow Leopard Server will be where ZFS makes its debut. It won’t be long before regular users will want it in their Mac Pro’s and so on…

OS X as a deployment platform for production MySQL servers? This is not far off, I’m sure.