Innovation That Drives Opportunity for the Web Infrastructure

More notes from Velocity

Last session before the break is "Innovation That Drives Opportunity for the Web Infrastructure" by John Fowler (Sun Microsystems). John is responsible for hardware at Sun.

Applications are built in different ways.

Three things Sun is working on:

1. Computing
2. Open Storage
• focusing on $/performance
3. Networking
• huge bandwidth
  

He is talking about Web 2.0 architectures. The software running today wasn't there 10 years ago. Almost everyone is horizontally scaled which brings up a host of technology issues.

Sun's Web 2.0 kit: a set of performance and benchmarking applications. Sun will be open sourcing this and other tools. The tools tested are web/app server, cache layers, database and storage.

It's driving you crazy:

• power, heat, space
• scale
• understanding the infrastructure
• performance
  

Compute:

• relatively straightforward
• clock rates not going up. everyone scaling horizontally
• lower memory latency
• how can you have a high degree of concurrency
  

Cores and threads are on the move. Sun is working on 16 cores per socket. Future is higher and higher degrees of concurrency.

Open Storage (Servers + Storage + Open Solaris) :

• built on OpenSolaris
• performance of ZFS and SSDs
• cost efficiency of volume hardware
• scale easily
• millions of files
• gigabytes / sec
• management simplicity
• analytics with dTrace
• diagnostics with FMA
  

Why Applications Don't Perform:

• Waiting for DATA

Future:
Enterprise SSD:

• up to 5,000 - 8,000 write IOPS
• up to 30,000 to 40,000 read IOPS
• 32 GB
• $ per IOPS $0.08 compared to $2.43 traditionally.
  

New generation of flash is quite reliable and has no moving parts. Power consumption of SSDs is 2 watts compared to 13 watts for traditional HDD.

ZFS Hybrid Storage Pool Model:

• High Performance Read and Write Cache Pool
• ZFS combines main memory and SSDs for read caching
• Adaptive Replacement Cache (ARC)
  

ZFS Intent Log pool

• ZFS is a transactional file system
• intent log stores small transactions
  

New Server memory hierarchy includes flash. Before 2010, flash will be in every server.

Also see:

• Innovation That Drives Opportunity for the Web Infrastructure PDF Presentation
• Innovation Drives Opportunity: Sun's Software Business PDF