Cloudera raises $40m. Accel announces $100m fund. Rackspace takes OpenStack private. And more.

# Cloudera raised $40m in series D funding and announced a partnership with NetApp around its NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop.

# Accel Partners launched a $100m Big Data Fund to invest in Hadoop- and NoSQL-related vendors.

# Rackspace …

Usually my posts are MySQL related though sometimes I will add something that I find that may not be related to MySQL....  like this. Sorry guys at http://planet.mysql.com :)

Here is a cool little NetApp feature to see where all the lovely windows CIFS traffic is going.

The command is 'cifs top' and it needs to have stats capture enabled on the NetApp for it to work. Here it is in action.


nas01b> options cifs.per_client_stats.enable true
nas01b> cifs top
ops/s reads(n, KB/s) writes(n, KB/s) suspect/s IP Name
44 | 6 206 | 0 0 | 0 | 127.0.0.1 IMG01\notreal
44 | 6 192 | 0 0 | 0 | 127.0.0.1 IMG01\notreal
44 | 6 182 | 0 0 | 0 | 127.0.0.1 IMG01\notreal
39 | 5 133 | 0 0 | 0 | 127.0.0.1 IMG01\notreal
nas01> cifs top
ops/s reads(n, KB/s) writes(n, KB/s) suspect/s IP Name
100 | 15 415 | 0 0 | 0 | 127.0.0.1 IMG01\notreal
96 | …

We don’t pay enough attention to Hadoop.

By “we” I mean DBAs, the rest of the world is paying plenty of attention to Hadoop. Recently, I started asking my customers and fellow DBAs about Hadoop adoption in their company. Turns out that many of them have Hadoop. Hadoop shows up in large companies and small ones, in established industries and in startups. Its everywhere.

The way Hadoop shows up in all companies, and the way DBAs don’t pay Hadoop much attention, reminds me a lot of how MySQL started showing up in the enterprise. It didn’t start by DBAs showing up one morning and telling their managers:
“There’s this new open source database. Its not as stable as Oracle and it doesn’t have all the features we need, but man – its going to save us tons of money, and its pretty simple to manage.”

Nope, this never happened. What happened instead is that developers learned about MySQL, and it seemed …

EMC launches Greenplum HD. DataStax releases Brisk. And more.

# EMC launched its Greenplum HD Hadoop distribution, with the support of Jaspersoft, Pentaho, and SnapLogic, among others.

# DataStax …

A special extended edition of Tech Messages for 2011-01-27 through 2011-02-02:

• NetApp File Copy | A NetApp Technical Diary
  There's a lot of ways to copy files on a NetApp Filer.
• NoSQL at Netflix
• Netflix Performance on Top ISP Networks

…

We noticed some performance issues on one of our Netapp Filers and during my investigation I noticed a few things that happen under the covers and I wanted to share them with you.

Netapp SnapMirror is an asynchronous method of mirroring files from one location to another. At my company we use it to replicate property images from one datacentre to another. I've always wondered what happens to the replica as SnapMirror is a block copy though obviously the destination may be different therefore it needs to do something 'smart' to correct the differences between the two filers.

The 'smart'ness is what is causing performance problems - so lets go through them.

Here is some of the output of a 'statit' on the SnapMirror replica. The filer is idle - its not doing any traffic and its not snapmirroring.

nas02*> statit -e

Hostname: nas02 ID: xxxx Memory: 16376 MB
NetApp …

Netapp, enterprise network attached storage devices with OS, Data ONTAP has a per volume specific variable called 'maxfiles'. Basically the maximum number of inodes the volume can consume independent of disk utilization.

Unfortunately this variable must be set per volume, it cannot be 'unlimited' and it cannot be downsized.

According to the man page:

DESCRIPTION
maxfiles increases the number of files that a volume can
hold, as close as possible to max. File inodes are stored
in blocks, and the filer may round the requested max num-
ber of files to the nearest block.

Once increased, the value of max can never be lowered, so
the new value must be larger than the current value.



Further increasing this value to be an unlimited-like variable consumes filer RAM and will result in less usable filer RAM after a Data ONTAP OS …

Last week, I was at the NetApp office in North Sydney for the presentation on NetApp SnapManager for Oracle. It was good opportunity to learn more about NetApp snapshots while working on a project for one of our clients in Sydney. It was an especially interesting topic as I have some experience using Veritas Checkpoints (see my presentation on test systems refreshes), and it was interesting to see what’s different and new in the NetApp implementation. But I digress.

I learned that NetApp can provide access to the same LUNs via either Fiber-Channel (FC) or iSCSI. And this is when the interesting argument surfaced. Apparently, some companies aim to have the technology stack on their …

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 …