Many people have asked me how Oracle's recent actions will affect OmniTI and our clients. As you may or may not know, a considerable amount of OmniTI's internal infrastructure is built around the OpenSolaris platform. Given Oracle's recent announcement about their path forward toward Solaris 11, what does that mean for OmniTI and OmniTI's customers? In short: what's old is new and what's new is old and business as usual.

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My colleague Mark Harrison at OmniTI wrote a nice little piece on Solaris Containers (Zones) and how we use them (a lot). It’s a short and simple read, good for psuedo-technical people that want to know a but more about Zones.

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So, there's this really neat little conference being run by Percona. It's in the Santa Clara Convention Center on April 22nd and 23rd. If you are in the bay area, you should come check it out. It's *free* and the speakers list is simply smashing. I'll be giving a talk on a largish PostgreSQL install that happens to be on Solaris on ZFS. So, interesting stuff all around. I don't make it out to California that often, so if you want to catch me -- that'd be a good time.

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For those interested, here is my slide stack from PostgreSQL Conference East '08. I think the title of the talk was "PostgreSQL: Looking under the hood with Solaris." The presentation was 90 minutes long and had lots of shell-based show-and-tell. Obviously that stuff isn't available in the slides. I think it went over quite well. The audience was small, but hopefully people took away the a lasting impression of what DTrace has to offer and at least one person had the response: "

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So, we're moving from an old Cyrus installation to Zimbra. We considered moving to Dovecot, but the need for tight corporate calendaring that isn't hosted by big brother (Google or Y!) was too strong. So, I call up Zimbra... Me: Gimme that for Solaris. Zimbra: No. Me: Umm... It's open source and the "closed" bits are non-native Java. Zimbra: Umm... It doesn't work on Solaris, just install Linux. Me: Just give me a sound off-site backup strategy that works as well as ZFS.

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An app that we've been running for a long time in development was being tested in a staging environment and exploded immediately. It's a mod_perl app that has run well for years, but on this new machine as soon as a web request would happen, the process would swell to 4GB of RSS, consume swap and then segfault. Ouch! So, the first diagnostic step I usually take is the quick and easy execution of truss(1).

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Author's picture

Theo Schlossnagle

Distributed Systems, Scalability, and Operations. read more

CEO - Circonus

Maryland, USA